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Email PageTransfigurations
November 10, 2007- December 22, 2007
Reception: November 9, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Tao Aimin, Gaye Chan, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Liu Zheng
SEPIA International | The Alkazi Collection
148 W 24th StSEPIA International is honored to present Transfigurations, a group exhibition featuring Tao Aimin, Gaye Chan, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Liu Zheng. Each unique in approach and vision, these four artists address cultural "overlays" and shifts, using visual juxtaposition and the construction of parallel realities and histories.
With her latest series, The Virtual Immigrant, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew explores cultural dislocation and collapsing borders as seen in telephone call centers in Bangalore, India. The installation consists of lenticular portraits and audio excerpts of the call center employees, shown in their Western "work" clothes and then morphing into their traditional Indian attire. The lenticular process allows both views in one print, further emphasizing the discontinuity of Indians becoming virtual "Americans" at the workplace yet physically remaining in India.
Produced between 1994 and 2000, Liu Zheng's series, The Chinese, examines the enormous cultural changes taking place in China during the 1990s. Zheng portrays a broad cross section of society including the wealthy, the poor, coal miners, opera performers, as well as waxwork figures in historical museums. Throughout his imagery Zheng maintains a sharply honed balance between disturbing reality and a vision of tenderness, keenly rendering a culture wrestling with the growing divides between tradition and modernization.
Gaye Chan's series of photographic montages, Historic Characters and Famous Events, muses upon historical dislocation. Chan integrates snapshots of "anonymous" people with illustrations found on the pages of an 1894 ten-volume set of books bearing the same title. Now transformed into a visual narrative, this constructed history gives greater importance to the unknown people depicted in these found photographs than to the well-known figures that are obscured.
The ink wash rubbings of wooden washboards by Tao Aimin evoke personal histories through touch -- both the touch of the artist's hand and the touch of the rural Chinese women who used these boards. Mostly illiterate, the women who toiled over these washboards become invisible, unable to participate in their own written history. The physical traces of their labor upon the washboards remains the only record of their existence, the sole "diary" of their lives. Aimin amplifies this faint trace with her own hands as she creates these rubbings.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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