Asian American Arts Centre
New York, NY
November 19 - December 31, 2004
Traditionally topography maps a land for the purpose of making it understandable and navigable. Through topography, one can “read” a landscape, making known what was previously unknown through a series of relationships and contexts. But as a form of mapping, topographies can be used to chart any realm of the unknown or unseen, not merely of the “natural” world.
In this exhibition, artists delve into a different kind of world, the landscape of absence made up by the overlooked actions, impulses and accumulations of our daily existence. Steven Gwon, Amy Kao, Shin il Kim, Cynthia Lin, and Lisa Young use their work as a means of studying the topography of their lives, and in it, find those “absences” to be a kind of fullness instead. I have chosen work that allows us to experience unexpected wonder in the very mundanity of our lives.
Detail of drawing by Cynthia Lin
The physical detritus of our lives is Cynthia Lin’s subject. Her drawings of lint and dust chronicle an intricate world that lives, literally, underfoot. They are presented on shelves for closer inspection by the viewer. Their intricacies allow one’s eye to wander through the groupings of bits of hair and lint – a survey of an overlooked landscape not unlike the visual voyage through a detailed Chinese landscape. By paying close attention to this trace evidence, Lin offers an opportunity to re-assess not only what is important to us, but also how we are constantly leaving landscapes behind us by our very existence.
Lisa Young’s spoken word piece is based on another kind of detritus: fortunes she’s collected over the years from fortune cookies, all that remains from otherwise forgotten meals. She preserves these “propheses” digitally so she can later search for specific words or phrases. The results are a kind of “found poetry,” which take on a meaning and beauty their original randomness could hardly have predicted. The “poems” reveal more about the desire to create order and imbue the unknown with meaning than any fortune could.
For Shin il Kim, drawing is a way of bringing evidence of the hand into the virtual realm. He starts by videotaping his subject. Then, frame by frame, he meticulously “draws” the subject by pressing a stylus into paper, creating an indented line. After hundreds of these drawings, Kim then digitally photographs them and creates a new video from these images, a digital flipbook. His piece “Bow” begins as an outline of the artist slowly bowing, his standing body slowly collapsing into a ball-shape. Looping continuously, the figure moves from its recognizable human shape into an abstract form and back again, just as the act of prostration is an opportunity for us to move from our individual, physical state into a different, spiritual realm that allows us to connect with the abstract and universal.
Site-specific installation by Amy Kao.
Amy Kao overturns the relationship between camouflage and landscape: the camouflaging agent does not blend into the existing landscape, rather it creates it. What looks like a misty landscape is actually layers of white vinyl cut in camouflage patterns found on military clothing -- patterns that then became a fashion statement in urban settings. In becoming so widespread, however, these patterns are now mundane and overlooked. Kao’s work investigates the shifting relationship between what is hidden and what is revealed. In an ironic twist, she focuses on the means of hiding or protecting: i.e., that it hides is more important than what it hides. At the Asian American Arts Center, Kao will create a site-specific installation that explores these themes in a larger format.
Steven Gwon records the day through a series of lines corresponding to the date and the times of sunrise and set, rather than focusing on the narrative content of time passing. Drawn in different colors, these accumulations of lines have an overall shimmering rainbow effect when viewed as a set documenting days, weeks and months. His work is a formal representation that allows the viewer to reconsider the day within the context of a fluid visual continuum. Each rising and setting of the sun is a mark that, when noted, has a relationship to the previous day and the next day. Reminding us that our lives are made up of these flowing moments, each is linked to one another, creating something unexpected.
Each of these artists argues for shifting attention to small gestures and overlooked patterns as a means of coming closer to their essences. They remind us that there are worlds to be discovered, even in the most mundane of our experiences. What seems to be absence may actually be filled with meaning and wonder.
--Katarina Wong, November 2004
Posted the first post, but he never published. I am writing the second. It's me, a tourist African
http://www.alexioonline.com/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=31380
Posted by: neistiluews | January 20, 2010 at 01:28 PM