ARTIST STATEMENT
On a grey, rainy day in the mountains of southeastern China, I was waiting for a bus. The mist thickened. The bus didn’t come, so I began to walk. Plodding up the sticky road, it felt as if I was walking in a Ming-dynasty landscape painting, complete with misty mountains and flying birds. The fog slowed everything down. It wasn’t until I had passed the second village, lost in my thoughts, that the rumble of the approaching bus brought me back to reality. I waved it down.
Later, stepping off the bus, I received some odd looks from villagers huddled under porches and inside houses out of the rain. Not too many outsiders came this far. I asked if anyone could point me in the direction of the kiln ruins. Eventually, a sympathetic woman convinced her husband to show me the way. We headed up the mountainside with the wife’s pink umbrella, some black rubber boots, and a machete. Before too long, we were standing on top of the imperial Longquan celadon kiln ruins, the mossy ground covered in layers of green shards dating back to the 13th century. Not wanting to keep an old man out in the rain too long, I explored the area and soaked in the experience as quickly as possible. The man insisted I take a few of the better shards home with me. Back in the village, I noticed that the tiny, green, glistening flakes of history were also embedded in the village’s cobblestone road. Centuries of transporting ceramic work out in carts had left its traces.
A few weeks later, I was crossing busy streets in old Shanghai. I had to be nimble to avoid being hit by bicycles and rickshaws. Street venders hawked their wares. Across the Podong river, the city’s business district stretched its futuristic skyscrapers up into the sky.
These were just two of the places I visited during nine months spent researching ancient ceramic kiln use throughout China. Passing through such extreme differences in cultural landscape, I became increasingly aware of the tensions inherent in the simultaneous pursuit of economic advancement and cultural preservation.
An ongoing exploration of these tensions now informs my work. Currently I am working on "Bloom", a look into the transformations occurring in China as the country plays an expanding role in the modern global market. In this series, spurts of homogenous figures appear to be blooming out of Chinese sculptures and statuary heads, showing the growing pains and changing effects of rapid economic growth. The homogenous figures appear to be both decorative and disruptive, representing the blending of the old and new.
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