Art

Present Tense Biennial, Chinese Culture Center

In August I had the opportunity to take a private curator-led tour of the Present Tense Biennial exhibition at the Chinese Culture Center here in San Francisco before it closed on August 23. The exhibition was a joint project of the Chinese Cultural Center and the Kearny Street Workshop and included 31 artists with works that interpreted contemporary Chinese culture. There was no single direction or theme to these interpretations. There were plays on Chinese language, heritage, stereotypes, geography, artistic techniques, history and iconic objects.


[Nostalgia No 24 by Maleonn. Image courtesy of the CCC online gallery. Click image to enlarge.]

The above image, featured on the posters for the exhibition, is a photograph entitled Nostalgia No. 24 by Chinese artist Maleonn. It features a young man looking at a miniature model of the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing.


[Manuscript of Nature V by Cui Fei. Courtesy of CCC online gallery. Click image to enlarge.]

In keeping with the exhibition title of “Chinese Character”, several works dealt with plays on language. For example, the New-York-based artist Cui Fei’s Manuscript of Nature V was a large wall installation composed of plant tendrils resembling Chinese calligraphy. It was immediately reminiscent of handwritten Chinese characters (as I had seen many times in my recent visits); however, this was an entirely made-up character set.

Tamara Albaitis presented an audio and sculptural installation, with two planar arrays of speakers. Each speaker played a human voice uttering sounds (not strictly phonemes, but vowels, consonants, diphthongs, etc.) from various languages. On one side were sounds from languages arranged strictly horizontally (e.g., English and other Indo-European languages) while on the other were languages that could be written vertically, such as several East Asian languages. One could walk through the middle of the installation, with each bank as a “wall” of linguistic sounds, or around the outside. Out of context, it was not easy to distinguish the sounds from one language or another. One could use directional cues to determine whether a language was “horizontal” or “vertical”, but that served more to demonstrate similarities or “confusion” among languages.


[Larry Lee, Endless Column. Photo courtesy of the CCC online gallery. Click to enlarge.]

In addition to the plays on language, these pieces were in the minority that I would consider to be “modern art” (rather than more loosely defined “contemporary art”). Another was Larry Lee’s Endless column takes a simple and familiar object, the traditional porcelain rice bowl,and arranges them in an “endless column” of spheres that extend from the base to the ceiling of the gallery. From a distance, it appears as a large piece of modernist abstract art, and the rice bowls are purely there for their shape and texture, rather than their function. However, the detail and functional context of the bowls are an interesting contrast to some of Lee’s other abstract sculptures (some of which can be seen at the CCC online gallery) with the simple geometry and solid colors that are the norm for abstract art.

Among my favorite photographs in the exhibition were Thomas Chang’s images of a Chinese-government-sponsored project in the United States that did not go so well. Spendid China was a theme park in Orlando, Florida (where else could it be?) that featured to-scale models of great Chinese monuments, including the Great Wall and others. The park closed in 2003, after which it became a frequent target of vandalism and fell into disrepair. Chang’s photographs document the ruins. I have a long-standing interest in ruined buildings, particularly as they appear in the context of a modern city, so I was intrigued by these photos even without knowing the full context. I think it would actually be interesting to visit this park in its current state.


[Thomas Chang. Great Wall. Splendid China Theme Park, Orlando, Florida.
Image courtesy of the CCC online gallery. Click image to enlarge.]

Other photograph sets explored the concept of “Chinese identity” as well as the intersection with American identity. Whitespace by David Yun presents portraits of an extended Chinese-American family (presumably taken around Christmas time). There are individuals we conventionally think of as “Asian”, a young blonde girl, and others who look vaguely Latino or Mediteranean, yet these are all blood relatives in the same family. I can certainly identify with a family whose composition defies traditional expectations, with relatives who appear to be from different parts of the world. Yet both my own family and the family presented in Whitespace are quintessentially American, i.e., this is what many American families look like when you get everyone together. Another take on family is presented in Sean Marc Lee’s portraits of his father. We see the typical “American Dad” in the Los Angeles area. But we also a man who seemed to have an exceptionally fun and playful attitude towards life even while raising children; and someone who knew how to “ham it up” for the camera. We see him blowing out candles with his children, posing like a TV still in a 1970s leisure suit in front of a sports car, going for a swim in a mountain lake. We also see him later in life, aging, resting, and receiving medical treatment. There are similarly familiar and intimate portraits of Lee’s father on his flickr site.

Kenneth Lo combines commentary on Asian identity in the United States with a lifelong dream to be a basketball star, in one of the shows more entertaining pieces Happy Feet Lucky Shoes. This conceptual work centers around a new brand of athletic shoes marketed as the AZN INVZN (i.e., the “Asian Invasion”) with their own superstar “K Lo.” There was a commercial, in which a young man is getting crushed on a basketball court. But once he receives the “magic touch” from K Lo along with a pair of “Yellow Fever” shoes, he magically acquires unstoppable basketball prowess (along with straight black hair), overpowering his opponents and winning the admiration of attractive cheongsam-clad young women. In addition to the video, and themed t-shirts for sale, the piece also included a Chinatown storefront made into a shoe store that specialized in the AZN INVZN, and even actual reviews on Yelp.


[Kenneth Lo Happy Feet Luck Shoes storefront. Photos by CatSynth. Click to enlarge images.]

This was one of several installations scattered in the nearby blocks of Chinatown, beyond the boundaries of the standard gallery. Another was Imin Yeh’s storefront of household objects wrapped in the Chinese patterned fabric often used for gift boxes. Among the wrapped objects were dolls, fans, TVs, even an Apple Macbook:


[Imin Yeh. 710 Kearny Street. Photo by CatSynth. Click image to enlarge.]

Charlene Tan’s The Good Life incorporating “wrappings” of a very different sort. The piece was entirely made of photocopied fast-food wrappers from various locations in Asia. Several were clearly recognizable as McDonald’s wrappers, but for unfamiliar items. There was one that caught my in particular. It featured an Asian cartoon cat making the universal facial expression for “yummy!” surrounded by fish, and was presumably a wrapper for a fish sandwich or snack. I wish I could find a picture of that wrapper somewhere online.

We close with another of the neighborhood storefronts, a text-based work by Tucker Nichols in the Chinese for Affirmative Action window, declaring “YES WE ARE”, a riff of Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” slogan. It faces inward, as if for the occupants of the office to affirm themselves while looking out at the world.


[Window installation by Tucker Nichols. Photo from the Kearny Street Workshop blog.]

A special thanks to Ellen Oh, Executive Director of the Kearny Street Workshop and co-curator of the exhibition, for hosting our tour.

The Kearny Street Workshop will be hosting their annual APAture festival, showcasing Asian Pacific American art. We at CatSynth look forward to attending at least a few of the events.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Enjoying the outdoors.

Our weather continues to be unusually warm and sunny (considering the reputation of San Francisco summers from Mark Twain’s apocryphal comment). And Luna continues to enjoy time out in our little urban garden.

Here we see her strolling:

And stopping to pose in front a metal screen sculpture:

Right now, we have two sculptures outdoors: the black metal screen, and the rusted metal work Pierced Screen by J. Michael Smiley.

This weekend is looking to be exceptionally warm again (well into the 90s in this neighborhood), so Luna has wisely retreated indoors.

Weekend Cat Blogging #221 is being hosted by Mr. Tigger at the M-Cats Club.

The Carnival of the Cats will be up this Sunday at When Cats Attack.

And of course the Friday Ark is the modulator. But it looks like they are moving to a new “Modulator Manor”. Recalling the chaos but subsequent rewards when we moved to the new CatSynth HQ, we wish them well!

Containment Scenario: FUEL, Luggage Store Gallery

This performance, entitled FUEL, was part of the Containment Scenario performance series “which explores the current environmental situation through the lens of improvisational music-dance-theater.” This was the third part of a five-part series adopted from the book Containment Scenario: DisloInter MedTextId entCation: Horse Medicine by M. Mara-Ann, who also directed this performance.

This was a multimedia piece with voice, text, instruments, dance and reactive video (Luke Selden). It began with the vocal leads (M. Mara Ann and Sarah Elena Palmer) sitting down in the front of the stage with computer printouts, loudly ruffling and connecting them up with packing tape. As video of bucolic grass scenes and a close-up of a human are projected on the walls behind them (and onto their reflective white dresses), we hear their voices come in, speaking words disjointed and percussively. The voices gradually become more melodic, but all the while the “paperwork” continues. The other performs move slowly onto the stage, all wearing white shirts. As they take their positions, first the guitar (Noah Phillips), then the electronics (Travis Johns), then violin (Emily Packard) and percussion (Anantha R. Krishnan) all came in.

Musically the texture remained very gradual, interspersed with vocals, though the words became clearer and louder over time. This was aided by the fact that the text (presumably from the Containment Scenario source) became synchronously part of the music and the projected media. Text scrolling by on the right video projection was recited in various musical styles, harmonic, percussive, expressive, while the vocalists took turns typing their words into a laptop that would project onto the other screen, sometimes mixed with other videos. During this section, the instrumental music was much more sparse, often silent as the written and spoken words became the focus.

Later textual recitations returned from the video to the computer printouts. At times the words came out as whispers, sometimes more melodically, with the instrumentals returning into the mix. As the performers moved around the stage, there were dramatic visual moments where they became part of the video projection, their white shirts and dresses becoming screens on which the video was reflected and distorted and combined with the flat background.

The dancers (Julie Binkley and Rebecca Wilson) eventually took the printouts used for the back screen and began to wrap each of the musicians in a cocoon of paper. First Travis Johns on electronics was encased, then the each of the others in succession, eventually binding the two vocal leads into a bundle of their own printouts. The piece concluded with the dancers bringing out large number signs (I’m not sure what these were about), and handing them to the vocalists, after which the sounds and words gradually stopped.

The performance of Containment Scenario: FUEL was preceded by two fun sets of improvisational music.

The first set was by Drew Ceccato, playing an electronic valve instrument (EVI) by Steiner and an analog synth by Crumar – a beautiful and intriguing instrument. The set began with a low rumbling, which joined with “watery” sounds and pitch modulation expressively controlled by the EVI to create a subtle rhythm. Over time, this become louder, with wider pitch modulations, beating, percussive sounds before returning to the low rumbling. The music then changed completely for more traditional “analog sounds” with traditional pitched notes, like a conventional wind instrument, though with extremely high pitches at times. It was a very brief, and very intense set, without a moment wasted.

Ceccato was followed by a duo of Gino Robair and Christopher Riggs who was playing “guitar and a box of cool looking stuff”. Of course, Gino Robair had his collection of cool stuff as well, analog synthesizers along with metallic resonant objects and various means of exciting them. It started with a metallic roar, which I believe was created by Riggs’ rubbing the guitar strings. This was combined with the chaotic sound of the Blippo Box and other synths. The two performers appeared to come to an equilibrium of sorts, with sounds repeated and played off one another. Indeed, it was sometimes hard to tell who was playing what sound – and this is a good thing. Robair moved on from the synths to cymbals, with loud dramatic resonances set against the guitar rhythms. I heard a plaintive brass synth set against a more “chattery” guitar; a styrofoam instrument that was “insect-like” in both its appearance and sound; a funny voice vaguely like throat singing made with a tube and a coffee can; and more metal objects excited by motorized fans crawling along the floor. After a climx with angry resonances and a metal on metal thud, lots of motion, convulsing and fast scraping, the sounds faded out.

The turnout for this particular evening was quite impressive, it seemed that all the seats were filled, even the extra “kiddie seats” that the folks at the Luggage Store often put out.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Rocks, and remembrance

This weekend we are again combining Weekend Cat Blogging with the week’s Photo Hunt theme of rocks.

Here we see Luna in repose behind one of our sculptures here at CatSynth HQ:

This sculpture has appeared in a few of our pictures before. It is called Red Rock Maquette by Steven Reiman, an artist in the Joshua Tree area who primarily works in large-scale metal works. This piece combines metal elements with a rock base.

I would like to more formally introduce more of the artwork here at CatSynth HQ, which has been lurking in the background of many of our photos. But time has been quite limited of late. Two performances in the past week, the reports still pending; and of course the regular business of daily life.

But time is also precious, and the Othello and Astrid remind us in this Weekend Cat Blogging #215: in honor of Sher, a regular at WCB who passed away a year ago. Life will hopefully slow down a bit in the next week, and one way to enjoy a quiet evening would be to prepare another of Sher’s recipes and spend time with Luna.

Hypnagogia, Climate Theater

Hypnagogia defines the state between sleeping and waking: the state in which our dreams can seem more real to us than the waking world, and which, depending upon the nature of our dreams, our limbo-selves seek to flee, or to sustain.

My primarily mission in attending Hypnagogia at the Climate Theater was to see the performance of The Flip Quartet by Polly Moller, as I will be part of upcoming performance of the piece in July. The performance featured Karl Evangelista, Jason Hoopes, Thomas Scandura and Bill Wolter. The Flip Quartet is a composition for four improvisers who move between four stations representing the cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) and the four medieval elements: earth, air, fire, water. Each station had a variety of instruments and sound-making objects to represent elements.


[click to enlarge]

“Earth” had drums, stones, and blocks. “Air” included various wind instruments and shakers. “Fire” featured metal instruments and electric instruments (keyboard, electric guitar, etc.). And “Water” included water-filled containers, but also acoustic string instruments – this was the only association I had a difficult time figuring out, with my own interpretation being “standing waves.” Each section of the piece starts with the performers “flipping” a timer. When the time runs out, they stop and move on to the next station.

The audience sat in the middle of the theatre, with half the seats facing one pair of elements and half facing the others. Since there were two performances, I got a chance to see and hear the piece from “both sides.” Musically, the piece unfolded as ever changing harmonies of the different objects, often very discrete and percussive, along with many theatrical moments such as attempting to balance on the “earth” elements on the head of a drum. My favorite moment musically was the combination of the Asian pipe (shown one of the photos above), lute, shakers and thunder tube.

The other musical performance was Philip Greenlief performing a solo work The Fourth World. The piece is based on Hopi conception of time and the Fourth World from Hopi mythology, and is a solo performance featuring Greenlief’s expressive and virtuosic saxophone playing. I am always impressed with his multiphonics, which he manages to make seem as easy to play as standard tones. Spatially, this performance was the opposite of The Flip Quartet, with the audience seated in a circle facing inward and creating a more intimate space.

In addition to the featured live musical performances, there were visual art pieces, installations, and media and performance art. Sean Clute, Jessica Gomula and Gina Clark presented a “video action painting and performance” entitled Slippery Dreams 2009.

Live video of the drawings being created were projected onto the screens, and I believe also used to control the sound that was generated.

Louis Rawlins presented the installation Sleep Patterns, set up as a bedroom or sitting room where one could relax and touch the ball of yarn on the table.


[click to enlarge]
The string (which included conductive thread) was used to generate sounds in response to the viewers interactions. Presumably, one could interact with this piece while asleep.

The were several video pieces of varying subject and quality. I did like Vanessa Woods’ What the Water Saw, a short film that originally was shot on 16mm/35mm film and transferred to video. It was meant to mimic ocean with the distortion of images through water, as represented by the intense layering and deep colors of the film. After looking at Woods’ website, I think I might have been more interested in some of her black-and-white films. Rebekah May’s Celestial Cadence for video on five iPod Touches was an interesting visual in itself, with its arrangement of abstract color and shape patterns:

Among the purely visual works that caught my attention was the undulating Circulation III by Julia Anne Goodman, a mobile work that was created from junk mail (and there is certainly plenty of that around); also Klea McKenna’s Taxonomy of My Brother’s Garden from Center of Gravity:


[click to enlarge]

Finally, as it was quite stuffy inside the theatre and gallery on this rather warm night, there was the welcome retreat to the rooftop, where VoxMaids performed rhythmic and traditional-sounding music for drums, accordion and voices against projections of astronomical objects. Alternatively, one could look at a real astronomical object, the moon, on this rather clear night.