|
Crafting Orbits
- Doris Ha Lin
Sung
Craft has traditionally been an artistic,
social, and utilitarian practice by which women negotiate their
relationships in the familial and social spheres. Following this tradition,
the artists in Shaping the Orbit use ceramic, textile, paper-cutting,
and assemblage to articulate the transient nature of their own experience
of cultural crossing and displacement. Ying-Yueh Chuang, Li Chai, and Karen
Tam move between locales shaping, cutting, weaving, and stitching out the
orbits of their lives, now and again revisiting (her)stories of womanly
work.
The stories of the three Chinese-Canadian artists in
this exhibition unfold from various locales. From Taiwan to Vancouver to
Halifax, Ying-Yueh Chuang has always been surrounded by the sea, which is
traditionally a symbol of voyage and impermanence. Gathering, saving, and
studying sea plants and natural materials, Chuang chose to work with clay,
focusing on organic forms, structures, textures, and colours. After moving
to Toronto, Chuang’s fascination with the city’s inland setting prompted
her to contemplate the meaning of being rooted to a specific locale. It is
this transition, from sea to land, that Chuang develops in her Plant-Creature
series, which depict hybrid ceramic forms of the sea, the land, and her
imagination. This reflection on rooting recollects an important Chinese
philosophical ideal: the forming of familial and societal wholeness through
grounding on the land. The ceramic installation +(Cross) conveys
Chuang’s understanding of the philosophy that describes the integration of
heaven, earth, and human (天、地、人). This philosophical idea
is articulated in the configuration of Chinese characters. Chuang borrows
the basic structure for the work +(Cross) from the composition of
the Chinese word “field” (田 ), which is a square
divided into four parts. The transparency of some of the materials in this
piece make the forms look as though they are floating. Chuang creates an
artificial ideal of paradise, in which memories are emerging and submerging
from sea to land, with the traveller’s traces contained.
Just as Chuang sees the cross in the centre
of the word “field” (田 )
as paths across a field, Li Chai sees the manipulation of the warp and weft
threads of her computerized Jacquard weaving as a metaphor for traversing
between places. Voyaging back and forth between China and Canada, Chai made
detailed records of pregnancy and childbirth, which she combined with
stories of her travels. These diary-like entries became the main texts and
images woven on her textile series M Body Watch. Using the
computerized Jacquard loom, Chai reproduced detailed photographic images,
such as the ultrasound picture of her unborn child in Embryo, onto
the fabric. These textile works hang from the gallery ceiling, resembling
life-sized garments and suggesting the spectre of a transforming body in
different places and times.
Chai’s
work shares symbolic meaning and value with the long tradition of textile
production by generations of Chinese women. It is a practice that defines
female roles and women’s contribution to society. However, historians and
even feminists researching gender roles have largely neglected its economic
and social value.1 Chai’s use of textile as her artistic medium
is a metaphor for her struggle between the shifting roles of working artist
and mother. The lowbrow attitude toward textile work and other craft
practices in today’s high art world is reminiscent of the neglect of
womanly work in traditional societies.
Karen Tam’s family has been running Chinese restaurants in
Montreal for more than three decades. Fascinated by how cultural symbols
and exotic “Oriental” objects are transformed and translated in order to
cater to racial stereotypes, Tam started to collect objects such as take-out
menus and rice bags, rearranging and remaking them in paradoxical ways. Tam
also became interested in paper-cutting, a traditional women’s craft often
used as window decoration and for ritualistic purposes, but which has been
appropriated for use on restaurant menus. MSG and Buddha Health Food
&Vegetarian Delight depicts a laughing Buddha – a popular symbol
and religious icon of good luck and longevity – holding a round plaque with
the letters “MSG” (monosodium glutamate) written on it. Although MSG is
used in non-Chinese restaurants and other food products, its negative
effect has always been linked to Chinese food, and by extension, to the
perceived irresponsibility of Chinese restaurant owners. Tam’s MSG and
Buddha is a parody of this syndrome and also of the perpetuation of
this stereotype by the Chinese restaurateurs themselves.
The woven
plastic strips of large rice bags form the surface for Tam’s cross-stitched
work The Canadian Pacific Railway: The Only Route Between the East and
West. Each stitch assimilates a step that moves along the surface of
the bag, acting as a metaphor for the displacement that 19th-century
Chinese railroad workers in Canada experienced. The title parodies an ad
slogan: the original “East” and “West” denoted the continent from coast to
coast, but Tam also implies that at the end of 19th-century, the only route
(relationship) between the East (China) and the West (Canada) was one of
exploitation.
The early
railroad workers travelled to Canada from China by boat. On Sailing
Across a Vast Ocean, 100 000 Miles Apart, Tam collaborated with her
mother, Yuen Yin Law. The mother and daughter team collected cigarette foil
from waiters and waitresses working in their restaurant, and folded them
into tiny boats that resemble the gold and silver ingots used at ritual
ceremonies as offerings to the ancestors and gods. In Sailing, the
gold and silver ingots are arranged on a large piece of red paper composing
a wave pattern. The floor installation is vibrant and shimmering, but
underneath this glamour is a sense of anxiety. The voyage carries with it
not a touristy lightheartedness, but a weighty apprehension of an unknown
future – a sentiment that might still be shared by new immigrants longing
for a better future on a new land.
Through their
works, Chuang, Chai, and Tam shape the orbits of their lives with hands
that elicit crossings of time, place, culture, and personal memory.
1 Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power
in Late Imperial China
–
(Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of
California Press, 1997), 176-177.
|
