What is a place made of? How do we distill its essence into a microcosm? How do we value it? What sacrifices does a city require?
This installation creates parallels between how the world's most expensive real estate market prices space and how we value art. Fragrant wax from HK's countryside, made of longan and lychee flowers, covers images of urban decay, the streets, walls and lives of Hong Kong. This encaustic wax mixed media process, invented 2000 years ago in Greece, preserves artwork for eternity. "ESSENTIA" comes from Aristotle's search for essence: “τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι”, “the what it was to be”.
Installation dimensions variable: mixed media panels, traffic cones and warning tape.
Individual elements: mixed media on wood panel, one square foot, 2019. Unique one-off editions, 1/1
Artwork price corresponds to Average Price of Real Estate in HK per Square Foot, February 2019, which was:
Hong Kong Island: $16,500
Kowloon: $14,000
New Territories: $10,400
Title from Liu Yichang's short story "Intersections"
Prince Edward
Kowloon
Side View
Title from Liu Yichang's short story "Intersections"
Prince Edward
Kowloon
"ESSENTIA" comes from Aristotle's search for essence: “τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι”, “the what it was to be”.
Installation dimensions variable: mixed media panels, traffic cones and warning tape.
Individual elements: mixed media on wood panel, one square foot, 2019. Unique one-off editions, 1/1
"In 1874 an American came to HK, arriving after a typhoon had wrecked the island. Some 10,000 boat families had drowned in the harbour. There was no way to avoid the bloated bodies, and when she disembarked, she felt her foot land on something soft." - Amanda Foreman
Sai Ying Pun
HK Island
"Life in HK transcends cultural and culinary borders, such that nothing is truly foreign and nothing doesn't belong." - Peter Jon Lindberg
Star Ferry, Tsim Sha Tsui
Kowloon
Sai Ying Pun
HK Island
Kowloon Tong
Kowloon
A paper storage cabinet was soaked during Typhoon Mangosteen ("Mongkut" in Thai) and these sheets of fragile tissue paper were not destroyed but instead turned into rainbows.
Mongkut was Hong Kong’s most devastating storm ever recorded, and as our climate changes the city will see more typhoons like these.
I created geometric forms from the kaleidoscopic papers and turned them into mail art.
* Series titled after an Elvis Costello song
Monachopsis: “the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place”
Fifteen years after moving away from America, I spent a chilly summer in San Francisco to explore the starting point of my life (the Bay Area) and envision the lives possible if I'd been molded by that city instead of others. And I discovered things wouldn't have been much different. The scenery? Some of the packaging? Yes. But it would have been fundamentally the same. Somehow it was the conclusion to a journey I'd not realized I'd been taking.
My conflicted relationship with America directed the choice of materials: paints made with crushed Afghan stones and painted on paper of US military uniforms, some of which had been worn on tours of Afghanistan.
Stories include the "17 Reasons Why!" sign. Luckily, Oddball Film's founder Stephen Parr rescued it before demolition
First phase of painting from an uphill ride out to Twin Peaks. White lead oils over Afghan lapis, painted on handmade paper of military uniforms: conflicts of materials as I work through ambivalence towards my home country
On the ferry to Vallejo. Painting the route from San Francisco to the town where I was born.
Second layer of four: lead white & Afghan lapis on US military uniforms. More here
First stage of painting the spiderweb abstraction of cables above Castro & Market. Painting possible imaginary lives if I grew up in this city where I was born.
Conflicts within and between materials as I work through ambivalence towards the home country I left many years ago:
Lead white over Payne's Grey Lapis & Ultramarine Ash on Combat Paper. More here
Walking though former shipyards on an Mare Island, across from the town where I was born. The flatness of landscape and architecture, the open space and acres of asphalt, so American.
Second layer of four, white lead oils over handmade acrylic lapis lazuli, on Combat Paper made of US military uniforms.
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The base layer of lapis was sparsely painted so I'll be generous with it later on.
At nearly midnight and an hour later than planned I clean up the lead and Canadian balsam with spike lavender & walnut oils painted on lapis and call it a day.
Halfway finished painting of home from a town where I was born but not raised and never really knew. I can only understand something completely once I paint it. Do I understand this place more now? Maybe.
First stages of a pared back painting of angular light. Looking at the artwork upside down to see how the shapes fit together. From a former speakeasy, Dylan Thomas quotes painted above the bar.
Lead white on Afghan lapis, painted on paper of US military uniforms. More here
Lead white and lapis make the gate of a bookshop saved by crowdfunding and leaving the neighborhood it helped gentrify. More here
Picked up 250 sheets of Combat Paper for this series from Shotwell Paper Mill. Made of US military uniforms, many in this batch were contributed by Jo, who wore hers in Afghanistan.
San Francisco's distinctive Don't Walk symbol was made into a watermark for Shotwell’s combat paper.
Grinding tempered glass with carbon silicate to create a rough surface for mulling paints
Grinding the finest grade of Fra Angelico lapis lazuli before mixing with walnut oil
Grinding the finest grade of Fra Angelico lapis then mixing with sun-thickened walnut oil
Folding lapis into oil with palette knife
Ground semiprecious Afghan stones paired with American science, mixed with handmade Russian glass.
Making paints more beautiful than whatever I can make with them. Lapis lazuli mulled with Golden (GAC 100) acrylic medium.
Eight shades of blue lapis lazuli for making paints, from leftover residue (Ultramarine Ash) to the finest grade, Fra Angelico Blue. I've always dreamed of using these crushed stones for painting, this year I finally managed it.
A 3-year project made of sunlight and shadows as they rise and decay, the ruin inherent in older Kowloon buildings like mine where concrete was likely made with seawater and crumbles before its time.
1: Solstice Prints (2017 & 18)
Fed up with peeling vinyl on windows from previous tenants, I decided to find beauty in their translucent patterns instead and turned my mid-century Kowloon windows into printing plates: an oxidized monochrome, light filtering through shadow and time.
Materials used to make the prints:
Cyanotype on cotton [British colonial] and mulberry/bamboo {Thai, never colonized] paper, detritus, time, air conditioning leakage, sunlight on longest and shortest days of 2017 & 2018
2: Elevator Shots (2019)
Visual documentation of a year of changing lives on one floor of an illegally subdivided building (avg 50sqf per capita living space), a microscopic shifting neighborhood viewed through tenants’ private belongings stored in public spaces as they’re moved, removed, chained and released or sorted, fire hazards created and cleaned in hallways and stairwells.
200,000 people in HK live in subdivided units, their conditions ranging from squeezed (like us) to inhumane (cage homes).
Cruel Luxuries is an exploration of the sacrifices behind many of humanity's highest or most luxurious art forms, from large (the Pyramids) to small (silkworms): a reflection on the duality of beauty and its opposite, which are often simultaneously present in art and culture worldwide. Cruel Luxuries consists of a half-hour dialogue with the past and future, each experimental performance incorporating more layers of sound and material.
Greenbacks Project pairs the US and China through our currencies. The US Dollar and Chinese Yuan are tied more closely, and affect more peoples' lives, than ever before.
For the project, US $1s and Chinese 1 Yuan notes, printed in different shades of green according to the aesthetics and messages their leaders prefer, are carved into the shapes of words people associate with money in different languages. Participants are all affected by fortunes tied to the Chinese and US economies. Mao and Washington's faces have been whitewashed over, leaving the verso of the bills green.
The design is loosely based on carpets created in Northwest China (Xinjiang), where Han Chinese and Persian influences were fused into unique designs. In this predominantly Muslim region, many are now being persecuted for their beliefs.
Process: US and Chinese currencies were covered in acrylic to erase the faces of the men on front: Mao Zedong - whose decisions in later years provoked famines and chaos which killed millions - and George Washington, a slave owner and part of America's legacy of white supremacy.
The whitewashing renders the bills invalid, a clean slate for the words which are carved into them. It also refers to money laundering, a foundation of international financial markets as well as the art world.
Project participants came from a host of national and linguistic backgrounds. They were asked: "Tell me a word you think of, when you think about money. Money is something we use every day, it has power over us, causes us stress or happiness. But it has as much power as we give it."
After carving, selected bills are mounted on bubble wrap and canvas.
Greenbacks Performance 1
Location: Central Hong Kong, outside Standard Chartered Bank, International Finance Centre.
Soliciting words related to money from passersby. The security guard did not donate any words but tolerated the artist's presence thanks to a note in Chinese describing the project.
Sundays are the one day per week when Hong Kong's domestic helpers have time off. They are paid low wages (around US$600/month) and employed on visas which do not allow them residency in the city. Most are from Indonesia and the Philippines, must leave family and children behind, and send the majority of their salaries home to their families.
A woman from the Philippines chose the word "Dahilan" -- "Reason" in Tagalog. Money is why she's come to Hong Kong, why she left her family, why she works so hard.
Greenbacks Performance 2
Location: Washington DC
Soliciting words from visitors at a gallery/cafe not far from DC’s World Bank headquarters, to carve into US dollars.
USD$1s purchased from Chungking Mansions and various Hong Kong HSBC branches for the project
[It is illegal to carve RMB in China, and USD in the US, though many artists have done so.]
Click here for artwork from 2017 & earlier
Selected writings are here
