Chinese Americans,
warriors more typical of antique pieces. The work interlocks tensions between art and commerce, as well as between what is specifically Chinese and what is unabashedly globalized. The blue-and-white aesthetic is also put to use by Wan Liya in his Thousands of Kilometers of
Landscape, a glazed porcelain assemblage from 2011. The piece comprises 21 separate vessels, all crowded together into a single line. But where historic pieces would adhere to a relatively limited repertoire of jars and pots, Wan Liya’s containers take modern forms: soda can, soap pump, milk carton, Windex sprayer, and so on. A similar displacement inhabits Taikkun Li’s 2009 Blue and White Coca Cola Bottle with Mountainscape .A caption offers his explanation: “The sutra ‘Emptiness is the form, form is the emptiness,’ has been inspiring me to think about handicraft art as my ‘vehicle’ to transcend conceptual art. If I tell you, this work is not handicraft, this is actually John Cage’s body, landscape painting is his ‘chi’ or ‘energy,’ how will you feel? Coke as the 20th century’s most popular beverage is my favorite symbol to express pleasure and optimism, and that’s my salute to Andy Warhol.” The most imposing example of intercultural commercial fertilization is
Temptation — Life of Goods No. 2, a 2010 entry in the Eden series of Sin-ying Ho, a Hong Kong native now residing in New York who gives a gallery talk at the museum on Sept. 15. The pot is taller than she is. “The size of the vessel is a reference to the human form,” she writes. “I began treating the surfaces with hand painted cobalt pigment, traditional Chinese Flowers painting integrated with a silhouette of ‘Adam and Eve’ as a reference to Renaissance paintings. Inside the silhouette of ‘Adam and Eve’ are the symbols, signs, charts and language of the free market, tracing complex human traits of greed, materialistic desires, hopes and technological transformations.” Indeed, close inspection of what at first appear to be abstracted decorative red medallions reveals that they are actually brand logos: MasterCard, Starbucks, Chanel, Disney, Nike, and others. She continues: “Referencing my own history being a Hong Kong Chinese in New York, Eden speaks to the potent nature of these cross-cultural intersections and hopes that these collisions bear meaningful fruit.”