Feburary Studio Visit

I started the studio visit three week ago, and intermittently met several BFA, MFA students as well as Alumni who just start their artistic career and the ones already in their mid-career. The original studio visit journal was written in the form of notes derived from each visit, the conversation with the artist and my own understanding of their work. But when all the visits are done, I feel strongly that there is a common theme flowing underneath these visits, the problem we discussed in one conversation usually developed, answered or further interpreted in another. The issue which I was confused and considering can be somehow inspired or refreshed by the reflection of all the visits as a whole. So finally, I try to write this journal as a whole. To me, these studio visits are extraordinary, which start without a given subject or a certain position, but end up with an axis. It is a process of opening myself, listening and trying to understand different values. At the same time, it is an act of rediscovering myself, my own practice of communication and interrogation, since the conversation sometimes initiated a collaborative reflection. It is like the concept in German romanticism that the conversation never reaches an end for it always only approximates its subject and therefore always requires continuation. One visit after another, a core subject is more and more clear and lead to new stage of considering and understanding.

***

I did not choose artists specifically at the first moment. I walked into BFA studio in the first week and pick artists randomly for the conversation, because I thought it is important for me to challenge what ever works I may or may not like, and make a way to understand them. So I talked to Audrey Tran and Whitney Hellesen in that week. I met Ji Hae Koo in the mixing and followed with a visit in her studio the other week, and then visited Kanako Okazaki. It is interesting to juxtapose their works, compare four of them under notions of authenticity, exotification and cultural-displacement. On same level, one person’s work may provide context and reference to another one’s work.

Audrey is an America born Vietnamese but never go back to Vietnam since she was born. I was a little bit surprised when she said she did not feel any cultural difference with her native American peers literally. Among many other Asian-American and Asian artists I have talked, she has the least cultural and identical confusion about herself. She is clearer and more confident about who she is, how her cultural identity has been shaped. Whitney is native American, but interestingly, Mao’s statues and images, China flag, Chinese characters are every where in her studio. After participating the NYU project in Shanghai, she did lots of works based on Chinese images and icons. I see it as a good example of how the so called "China" is consumed among western youth.

Audrey Tran

When I walked in to Audrey Tran’s studio, she was dying some toilet paper with natural tea powder. On her right side, a large scale installation occupies 1/3 space of the tiny studio. Looking from a distance, it seems like some early twenty century interior decoration, with wallpaper with geometry patterns and wood floor. A door made by toilet paper was set in front of the room. The pale color and cheapness of the door create an uncomfortable contradictory in front of the colorful room and bring up a feeling that either the view of a room is fake or we are staying in a mundane world but peeking a mystic space in a voyeuristic way. The yellow colored wall paper was made by some foam like compound, and shaped like countless caterpillars. The awkward contrast between the artificial compound and the organic form address a dialogue between natural and unnatural, human nature and post-industrial life.

Toilets, 2008, Audrey TranAudrey explained that environment is her long time concentration. She is interested in artist’s possibility to provide foresight for the next steps in enviromentalism. But her work is not only about the political conviction; aesthetical part is always bound in her work with the ethical or political aspect. She said in her blog that “it really is a difficult thing, for me at least, to understand when the balance between ethics and aesthetics has shifted too much to one side. Today, this is certainly the something to be aware of.” In the process of finding balance of art’s own sake and art as political message, she is addressing or reflecting our fears (consciously or unconsciously) and the existential questions of the Human Condition. As the Toilet work she made in 2008, which was all made of cardboard and paper, was described by Audrey herself with the words from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain...we happily ignore the Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliments. “It is clearly that Audrey’s work is pointing to the awkward aspect of contemporary human life beneath its clean and will designed surface, the green material is a key element in her work which helps to keep a balance in-between.

Audrey is really good at communicating and interpreting the inexpressible part of herself. When I ask a question, she can dig into it, and then, usually led to another significant one. Not all of the artists have this ability of oral expression. It might attributes to her minor degree in Journalism, which keeps her having dialogue with others and writing constantly. Artists are brilliant in that they see the same things we see but they see them in very different directions. But some of them more concentrate on their own world, good at talking to themselves, while others have good insights on how to communicate effectively, and makes others re-think themselves. I am sure that Audrey is the later one. Her works are always driven from daily life circumstance, but powerfully enlighten our way of looking at ourselves lives.

Whitney Hellesen

Whitney is honest about her understanding of China and her exotic Oriental imagination. The piece hanged on the wall center of her studio is a painting which simply changes clothe of Mao with a cartoon character. The image is Pop like, with stiff gesture and with no setting, no narrative, just like a mass production made for the purpose of consumption. Whitney said it is her way of approaching the so called “East”, it is the specific Asia image in her mind, which is more like a chic. Here, Mao’s image has no difference with a Disney character, for which do not necessary bear historical or political significance to her. Her other installation work done in Shanghai last year is installed with a huge amount of objects they get from the local market place. All the objects (such as pop-star posters from the early century, red flags, fake Buddha sculpture, commodities made in China, etc) were piled together randomly as a wholesale understanding of Asia society. But on the other hand, the whole structure of the piled mundane objects creates a monumental moment, not only rooted in the artist’s fascination in Asia, but the western society as a whole. In Whitney's work, I saw the shade of Orientalism cliché, an iconographical deconstruct of East. Although it is not a mature work, but I respect the honestness she expressed when talking about her own away of understanding the Far East.

Another set of Whitney’s work which has been done in Shanghai is more interesting and self derivative. In that photo works, she made a respirator with colorful printcloth for each person she knew, and shot the picture under a specific circumstance. She explained it as her own way of knowing other people, the different design and color on the respirator refer to her individualized visual perception. Looking at her work, we are suddenly led into her story telling tour, with pictures slide by slide passing in front, a wonderful film just start.

Ji Hae Koo

Ji Hae is another case. She was born and grown up in Korea and went to Chicago five years ago, since she came to NYU, her art is mostly working on the conflict distance between self and other, inner part of human perception and outer spaces, the personal memory of past as culturally specific identity and current situation as in-between East and West values. Maybe because of the unavoidable Asian personality, Ji Hae and Kanako’s works are tend to be more self-centric, or say, inner enlightening and exploring.

Honestly, Ji Hae’s work is not the kind of artwork which will suddenly catch my eyeballs. When it was showed in the Commons gallery, I took a glance at the work and directly passed by. I should admit that in the razzle-dazzle contemporary art world, easel painting is more or less a weak and invisible form; it is hard to be heart-stirring or pioneering. Among all the first MFA students, only two of them are painters. My discussion with Ji Hae started with the abstract painting titled Ambivalence, it is the work I was most confused. I can feel the distance in the two dimension work, a distance between the space created by the contrast of blue and red-green color, but I am not sure what did I see. Ji Hae said it is the second painting she did in New York. She started painting very early. Before coming here, she was studied in an art middle school, art high school and art collage in Korea, and transferred to School of Art Institute of Chicago three years ago. She was well trained in the fundamental tectonics of painting in these professional path, but since she come to New York, she soon realized this will trained ability strongly limited her production, it is like been thrown a large swamp and hardly to pull herself out. She was really upset about the first piece of realistic painting she did, and then pick up this two small canvas at hand, finished the “Ambivalence” in ten minutes with her mind totally blanked from any planning, emotion, and figurative memory. She immediately discovered the instable but extremely peace moment of producing, and decided to follow her instinct and subconscious. This painting as well as later ones is actually paintings of a perceptive process, a constant dialogical movement between the “I” and not ”I” rather than a finished, static image of a concrete scene. As Alexander Jovanovich described, Ji Hae works within the idiom of invisibility. Though her works are material, and are typically made manifest via formally exquisite painting, drawing, or idiosyncratic hybrids of the two, what she presents to her viewers, and always strictly on the surface, is a camouflage, a ruse. Her intellectual concerns, her emotional coordinates, land somewhere within the realm of odd systems and mistranslations, poetic stunt-making and fortuitous accidence. When I ask why she choose painting instead of other material, Ji Hae smiled and said the process of painting all ways made her exciting! In this stage, painting is her way to abandon all the past professional practice she did in the art school and get to know herself in a centripetal way. It is in the encounter moment of the American value and her Asian identity, she left the past behind and move forward to find a way to explore the self. It is on the opposite orientation with the road Kay Lin (whom I visited later) choose, who came to America from Taiwan fifteen years ago but insists to be the one she used to be fifteen years ago, and paint in a style just as she did in school. In the tension of experiencing different cultural identity, Kay arrives her own world by retreat, whereas, Ji Hae decides to move to.

I am really grateful for this studio visit. To me, it is an opportunity to challenge myself, to leave alone my personal preference, abundant the preset judgment of an artwork, and start to understand every piece of work from a humble attitude as well as to make effort to communicate with the work. I learned it from Ji Hae.

Kanako Okazaki

It was a cold and raining Sunday afternoon that I toke the E train from Manhattan to Long Island for a studio visit with Kanako Okazaki. Her studio is on the third floor of an old building across the street of PS1. I arrived five minuets ago and was surprised that Kanako was waiting me downstairs. She was in a pink color knitting dress and smiled like a teenage girl. The first impression made me hard to believe the woman in front of me is already over 30.

More surprisingly, Kanako was well prepared for this visit: the laptop and projector was already set up in the viewing room; the studio was extremely clean and neat; her former portfolios were on the desk; even juice and cup were prepared! I finally realize that all these detail are a part of who she is, her personality, her cultural background, her way of dealing things and her way of making art. But all in all, she is such a adorable girl, talking to her is an amazing experience. She was a little bit shy, missish, but once the conversation goes deeper, you will soon discover a indescribable beautful and fertile world hiding under her gentle and quiet appearance.

As many Japanese contemporary artists, Kanako’s work is cute, childish and cartoon-like, but at the same time, her work combines with a feeling of evil, jealous and loneliness. The narrative of fairy tale usually comes with brutal damage. When I asked if she has ever affected by the style of any Japanese artists, she told me that she used to working in Aya Takano’s art studio and paint for the artist, and this experience more or less has some impact in her work, however, Aya’s work is mainly about boy’s sexual fantasy and her work has nothing to do with this kind of theme but in many case a description of egoism and the tension between different relationship. For instance the work Teatime is bout human relationship in contemporary society. In the story, the girl is a conversation with the other character, but she is actually kept talking to herself without realizing whether the other is listening to her or not. When the first relationship fail, she continues to communicatein the same way with another character and end up with the other character is killed by jealous and then eaten by the girl. During all the process, all episodes are happening in silence, just as the girl is eager to express but never have real sound coming out. There are different layers of meaning going on in this work, the will of being understood, the loneliness feeling in a relationship, angry and sad, innocent and evil, childlike wish and ruthless reality, the desire of love and instinctive selfish. Kanako her self’s introverted Asian personality and isolated sensation in Western culture, her passionate and expressive part and the gentle, quiet part, her generation’s dilemma and tension are all concinnated in the four minutes work. Kanako’s early work do not have so many layers in one work, the narrative is more direct. When asked if she think there is any progress in different period’s work, or there is just different way of doing art, she said she believe there exists progressing, but it is in the development of the artists themselves, and the phases of development they are going through. It is not necessary that any later work should be more progressive then the earlier one, it can be inner progress, emotional progress when artist is going from one state to another and so on. (Not finish yet)