4 Story Building: CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN ARTISTS
The Lehman College Art Gallery presents 4 STORY BUILDING: CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN ARTISTS, featuring mixed media installations by four contemporary artists of Asian descent created specifically for this exhibiton. The show will run Tuesday, February 1, through Sunday, April 3.
Curated by Skowmon Hastanan, assistant to the director of the Lehamn College Art Gallery, the show includes the works by Tomi Arai, Ken Chu, Carol Sun and Lynne Yamamoto. Although diverse in presenation, these installations share a common narrative foundation based on the Asian American experience.
Tomie Arai’s works on paper and printed construction address the issue of hybridity — the dislocation and disjunction that characterizes the immigrant experience. In her recent work, the immigrant concern serves as a metaphor for what is perceived as foreign and marginal in American society. For these marginalized and uprooted communities’ traiditions, family, and the retelling of shared history form the principled possibility of the life that lies ahead of us. In her reconstructed narratives, visual references to elements in traditional Asian arts serve as a link between past, present, the exotic and the ordinary, the foreign and the familiar.
Ken Chu’s wall installations, employ a range of materials and presentations, from representative paintings to the assemblage of products found in local discount stores. One piece will address issues of the Asian American male and HIV epidemic and another confronts the origins and inherited traditionalism of male-centericism through images of gender abuse in Asian culture in the United States.
Carol Sun’s room installation of various objects and paintings, titled Archetype and Ritual in the Mundane Series, is an investigation of hidden “archetypes” in temporal objects and oridinary rituals. Mundane actions such as trhe pouring of water, sweeping with a broom, cutting a strip of ribbon with a scissor become allegorical icons that are painted or superimposed on found objects and household items such as broken dishes, pillows, and clocks. The artist hopes that the intersection of the epic images into the daily material world will encourage the discovery of multiple definitions and readings of deeper meaning in everyday life, which are often concedaled in the rapid-pace of modern society.
Lynne Yamaoto’s poignant mixed media sculptures originated from her family story. She collects and assembles objects that represent historical and emotional relics. Yamamoto recreates and re-interprets the experiences of her grandmother, who arrived in America as a japanese picture bride. The installation tells the story of her working and living conditions as a laundress on a sugar planation on the Kohala Coast of Hawaii before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In an autobiographical piece titled, Birth Gift, Yamamoto reiterates the continuation of her heritage and identify by arranging on glass shelves the Japanese girl-dolls that were given to her at each birthday.
FOUR STORY BUILDING’S catalogue contains essays by Kerri Sakamoto, a Toronto-born writer of ficition and film whose works have appeared in publications in the United States and Canada.
