Fresh from the studio: artists proof from a new series I’ll unveil – slightly – at TEDxKrungthep this Saturday
I’ve been invited to tell stories about my art, travels and inspirations for TEDx Krungthep in Bangkok this Saturday, September 4th.
“Handmade in a Digital World” will describe some of the characters I met during my search for handmade papers, the art I’ve made on the paper discovered on the journey, my unique take on the Cyanotype process, and more. Topics will include salvaged bombs, banana leaves and engagement rings as a contemporary form of Bride Price, and why the world is for me a gigantic art supply store, as well as a natural source of inspiration.
You can tune in to my talk by streaming it here on your computer or mobile at 11:05am Bangkok time.
What time is that where you are? Find out by clicking here.
Back in my 20s when I was making eyes at every bilingual boy who came into my narrow Midwestern horizons, I couldn’t imagine staying with a man when someone more appealing came along.
Since then I’ve stayed with one Man even while moving countries every few years. Moving to a new place is like changing lovers. For years my husband and I have moved from one place to the next, searching for something we still can’t define: career opportunities for each of us, different climates and clients and collectors, but also for something more.
When we moved to this west Sydney suburb, Australian friends warned us away from it: “It’s dodgy over there!” they said. But the Man’s company is just a suburb away, we heard there are great cafes and restaurants and a river nearby, and since I can work from anywhere, we decided to brave the warnings for a convenient commute.
But whatever we expected, it wasn’t this: a neighborhood that looks almost identical to the one where I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. Many of the buildings are the same age, the boulevards dotted with fast-food restaurants and wide parking lots look like doppelgangers of those I traveled to school. Cars drive on the opposite side of the road and accents are different, but the fundamentals are eerily similar.
It was exactly what I had decided to leave for good a decade ago. And here I had moved back into it. I was miserable. The Man was miserable for his own reasons.
But when I returned to Sydney a few months ago, I decided to change my attitude. It was time to ignore the mundane, the homogeneity of much of life in the ‘burbs, and to discover and savor the many pleasures our neighborhood had to offer.
So I did!
Here are some of my favorites:
These purple flowers are a graceful surprise in Sydney’s early spring
Fresh Persian bread from the bakery around the corner. It’s piping hot and delicious. Their artisanal yogurt is fantastic, too.
Harry’s Cafe de Wheels has just come to the neighborhood, another delicious way to expand local waistlines.
Our suburb is one of the oldest Australian settlements. When I was a kid I dreamed of making rubbings of old tombstones. A block away from our flat, there are loads of old cemeteries to walk through, atmospheric both day or night.
Some of the inscriptions are really one-of-a-kind, like this one from a pair of resentful parents in 1834
The dead erect fences just as they did while alive
Scrolls on tombstones were fashionable for awhile in the 19th century
And most of all, Australia is a painter’s paradise: the light is spectacular all year round
I’m not claiming these cultures as my own, but they are the cultures in which I live. My work comes from an Altermodern perspective.
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One Friday night, my boyfriend and I walked toward a dark underpass in Korea’s second largest city. We’d had a late night out with friends at the beach, and were headed back to my apartment. I lit a cigarette and my boyfriend threw his arm around me, leaning in for a smoky kiss.
As he breathed into my ear, we heard the unmistakable cries of salarymen out on the town for a night at the karaoke bar. I pulled away. We both walked faster, our eyes averted from the knot of three men headed in our direction.
One of the men stopped and stared at us. His face, flushed red with soju, turned purple. He rushed at my boyfriend, fists raised, swearing in Korean and vowing to pummel the “American”. But my boyfriend wasn’t the American, I was – the boyfriend was English. We stood paralyzed as the man rushed at him, spitting words into the space between them. The man’s two friends dragged him away and they struggled on into the night. Everyone there knew if we raised a finger against the locals it wouldn’t end well for the foreigners.
Foreigner. Stranger. An outcast with strange eyes.
It’s easy to feel the freak in a place where one’s skin, clothing and features are stared at or patted or giggled at everywhere outside of expat cafes and bars. When I had moved to Korea several months before, I wrote about the children shouting at me in the street, and diners who marveled that I could eat spicy Korean food with steel chopsticks. One friend replied: “Now you know what it feels like to be a minority.” A black lesbian who’s finally found her home in San Francisco, she knows all about the many ways there are to be different. And how rare acceptance can be.
She was right. For the first time it hit me, raised middle-class in a Midwestern metropolis that claimed to be color-blind but of course wasn’t – that only those who belong to mainstream culture have the luxury to believe the lie that we belong to a kind of human template. I realized the shape of my face, the color of my skin and eyes and hair represents something to everyone I meet. And for some, I am not welcome. In a place like Korea, with its history of tensions with my home country, my nationality has stirred resentment with local colleagues. Every time they looked at me, every time I spoke, I reminded them of their hatred for my country.
Some people have their idea of what a Real American looks like, and I don’t always fit. A Lao boat driver once peered beneath my hat. “Your parents are both American?” he said doubtfully. “You have black hair like Lao!”
Others are provoked by dress. Here in Australia people have a penchant for screaming out their car windows at strangers. On cold nights I’ll wear a scarf over my head and it’s been mistaken for a hijab. Then I get a specially high rate of incomprehensible shouters.
This video explores the tangle of cultures, identities, appropriations and transformations that occur in western fetishitization of Asian cultures a.k.a. Orientalism:
As I write I wear a pair of decorative Chinese coin earrings my father once bought on the streets of San Francisco; a silk tunic tailored in the back streets of Hue, Vietnam; a wedding ring from Chiang Mai; I bring an umbrella with me everywhere to protect from the sun and rain, a habit learned in Hong Kong. Some may call this Cultural Drag, that I’m wearing items from cultures that don’t belong to me.
When does this appropriation cross the line from being a natural offshoot of the life of a perpetual traveler like me, to becoming a costume?
When it becomes art.
Last year I walked through The Lanes in Hong Kong lined with cheap satin cheongsam, and as usual never gave them a second glance. Instead I opened the doors to Shanghai Tang and tried on this one. Two layers of brilliant red silk slithered over my skin and encased me perfectly. As though the body it had been tailored for was mine. I had wanted to experience this style of clothing since I’d created the New Calendar Girl series two years before. These characters inhabited an imaginary city somewhere between St. Petersburg and Shanghai. White Russians and red Communists and black marketeers and spies mingled in a decadent society where anything seemed possible yet everything was broken beneath a paper-thin surface.
To flesh out my characters in paint I wanted to feel how the fabric can move, pull and tug at a woman’s posture, sense how it restricts movement and gives confidence. I’ve worn it while painting, I’ve worn it for reference shots for my paintings, and once I even wore it at the beach in Sydney for my profile photo.
But I will never wear it in public again – save for masquerades like Hallowe’en.
Lapdog, Original Cyanotype with watercolor on cold press cotton paper, approx. A3 size, 2008
One sunny Sunday afternoon, I strolled the streets of my favorite island in Hong Kong, seeking a dog to photograph for the kids book I was illustrating. I was on the lookout for one of those creatures that look more like a stuffed toy than a real pet. Sometimes they’re even pushed by doting owners in mini dog strollers.
On that sunny spring afternoon I set off for Pizza Milano. Between bites of pizza, I snapped pictures of furry creatures, but the longed-for shot of a pet on four wheels remained out of reach.
Then I saw a couple dressed in casual designer outfits, all ready for their weekend trip to the wild outlying islands of Hong Kong. The husband carried their dog; typically owners like these don’t want pets getting their paws – and their household floors – dirty. The wife wore a sun visor that matched her dog’s, and held on tightly to the leash.
I hadn’t seen anything so coordinated since the Couples’ Sets worn by fiances around Korea.
The dog panted, its mouth half-open in the early summer heat. It was happy to be carried. I enhanced the dog’s smile with watercolor, as its bared teeth looked too fierce for a kids’ bedtime story. But still the dog’s eyes have a sinister look to them.
People may hold on to the leash, but lapdogs know they have their owners wrapped round a pair of fuzzy paws.
Here are some people who have helped me in my quest to be an independent artist. They range from artists to creative entrepreneurs who are shaping possibilities undreamt of 10 years ago thanks to the internet, like:
1. Chris Guillebeau, Creative Noncomformist who’s traveling to every country around the world while starting small businesses
2. * I was a featured artist for his Art and Money Guide - if you’ve a half hour to spare you can hear my interview with his collaborator Zoe Westhof by clicking here.
and creative marketers like:
3. Hugh McLeod, the ‘cartoons on the back of business cards’ guy
11. Speaking of videos, here Kirk Mastin explains how you can create your own HQ video studio with just a flipcam/iPhone and your laptop.
In a few months I’ll release my first self-published book in different formats. 10% of the proceeds will go to a Bangkok-based charity, and the rest will fund the transformation of a small Sicilian studio into a creative retreat for artists around the world.
If people love what you do, they will want to support it, even if they’ve only a couple of dollars to spare. Why not let them, and give them something back?
12. Kickstarter has given me some ideas for fundraising for my projects.
These artists are using new indie services and their fan base to make their projects happen:
19. This visual artist [some entries NSFW] is more forthcoming about bipolar disorder than auction strategies [but the fine art world has famously opaque machinations]. She began showing in the gallery system here in Australia, connected with collectors and the artworld through her galleries, then decided to go independent,
20. and Kesha Bruce is an American artist living in Europe who gives a glimpse of what a professional can achieve outside the insular NYC artsworld.
Successful artists experiment again and again before finding what works for them. Some of us even experiment with where we live.
21. Jon & Lea Woodward are an illustrator/marketer team who show people how to live and work remotely from locations around the world with their Location Independent websites. Have a look and start dreaming of where you’d like to go next.
What websites would you recommend to help creatives forge their own path?
Lai Chau, Vietnam, on assignment for my book Sensual Papers: Through the Back Roads and Rivers of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.
I’m standing by one side of the road as my guide pisses off the other. We’ve been chasing rumors of papermakers through the back roads of the province all afternoon but haven’t had any luck. I take off my helmet, wipe off sweat and sunscreen, and admire the view anyway.
My guide walks up next to me and shares a grin. “How about we go to the knife village?” he asks.
“Knife Village?”
“Yeah they turn car parts into knives. It’s famous throughout Lai Chau.”
If a province has no noteworthy features, why not make one up?
The road is lined with rickety open-air shelters, each strung with knives made by the family of blacksmiths who live in a house next door.
“These are all made from destroyed cars,” my guide says.
I picture the slender blacksmiths tearing apart car bodies.
“They use car springs, brakes, that kind of thing,” he says. I nod, as though I have an idea of what a car brake looks like, and pick up a knife. It is cold and rough, a pleasing weight in my hand.
“How much do you think they’d charge a foreigner for this one?” I ask.
“Let’s find the guy who owns this place,” my guide says.
We walk over to the house where an elderly man smiles at us through an open window. He reads through the mid-day heat, and his book catches my eye. It’s not printed in the Roman script of Vietnamese. Instead, its pages are covered in a hand-written script, neither completely traditional Chinese characters nor the modern version.
“This is a prayer book,” my guide says. “The man is from the Dao people, and this is their family’s book. The paper is….” he pauses to translate, “from China, maybe handmade, maybe not.”
I look through the translucent pages into the sunny sky. The paper fibers go in all directions. “It’s handmade,” I say. “Did he write the book himself?”
“He copied it from another book. No, this village doesn’t make paper anymore, there’s a road and they can buy everything they need from the markets.”
Except knives, apparently.
“Now he wonders how much you will pay for the knife. He can throw in a pair of handmade scissors for half price.”
Growing up, I was happiest in a room filled with books. I’d save pocket money from odd jobs and household chores and spend it on discreet paperback classics and pulpy fantasy novels. It was an escape from the tyrannical atmosphere of our family home, and my bedroom was soon filled with books containing worlds and words that offered a kind of comfort I couldn’t find anywhere else.
Today, every time I pass a quirky-looking bookstore I can’t resist going inside it. The best bookstores are one-of-a-kind places featuring indie publishers like mine, and a welcoming atmosphere that reflects the neighborhood, not the ethos of a suburban chain store.
My favorite neighborhoods in Sydney are Darlinghurst and Paddington, where the bookstores per-capita are the highest in town.
Who thought astroturf could look so good on a book cover?
Orange stools and flowers invite readers to spend some time with Ariel’s punk rock selection
Their kids’ section has a well-used table to tame small customers and give parents a few moments peace
And you can browse through books while relaxing on a couch under a pseudo-gothic poster of Winona Ryder by Marc Ryden
My next stop was Ampersand Cafe Bookstore, its three storeys filled with secondhand books selected by discerning buyers. Their staff are friendly, laid-back and highly caffeinated. Their Lindt mochas could knock a girl’s knickers off with a rich and creamy chocolate kick.
The best way to savor Ampersand is to soak in the atmosphere of their reading rooms like this one:
Reading by the light of a chandelier is a romance you can’t get at home
These velvet chairs are the perfect place to rifle through shelves packed with travel and art books. I found photos of handsome Moroccan men taken by Paul Bowles during his long residence there, and spent some quality time exploring imaginary worlds with Jan Morris. A room-full of books still gives a comfortable escape from a frenetic world, and offers undreamt-of possibilities.
What’s your favorite bookstore, wherever you are now or wherever you’ve been?
My favorite papermaker Supan Promsen with his niece and a woodblock printed on his paper, 1 x 2 meters
Each day I walk into my studio, and as I look over my work-in-progress, the paper I’ve been painting gives me a thrill. This unique paper is custom-made for my artwork by Supan Promsen, the man pictured above.
But while I like to use old-school art materials, everything else about the work is 21st century. Supan and I communicate by email, in English. He keeps me up to date on the progress of my paper as it’s being made, then FedExes it to me in Australia. I photograph myself and others with a digital camera as we model for my paintings, and use Google to translate text into Chinese, Thai, and Japanese for my current series.
Many times I’ve rued all the stuff it takes to make art. Usually when lugging artwork across town, or moving countries again. Easels and stretcher bars and large-format thick papers take up a lot of room. I’ve often wished I could be content with all my work being purely digital; it would make for lighter luggage, but artwork on an iPad wouldn’t give off that subtle mulberry smell that my paper does. Something like cornstarch. It’s an elixir to a materialist like me.
And that’s what keeps me working with all this stuff: the materials are a crucial part of the process: as I mold them with my ideas and hands, I transform them into art. Or [because nobody interesting agrees on a definition of ART anymore] something like it.
Detail of painting on Thai paper, 70 x 100cm, 2010
This is the image many have of Hong Kong – a junk cruising the waters of one of the finest harbors of the world, sails spread to catch the breeze. But when I travelled around the territory searching for images to illustrate my kids book, I decided not to make any cyanotypes of beautiful boats like this.
Why? Because Hong Kong people don’t actually use them in their daily lives, and haven’t for ages. What they DO use is more prosaic: taxis, double-decker buses and minibuses, and the MTR [subway]. Yet there are still some ways to get around town like Trams and the Star Ferry that are unique to Hong Kong; they’re the most affordable way to travel, and you’ll literally rub shoulders with all strata of society. Passengers coast the seas or the streets at a leisurely pace, and experience the transition from one neighborhood to another.
And best of all, these ferries are still as photogenic as ever.
