Over the course of 2020 and 2021 I have been learning 3D modeling to supplement my camera-based studio practice. These models will supplement camera-based footage in Hole Story. The models produce an uncanny appearance as camera-based footage, which is captured with without depth, is warped and modelled into a 3D landscape that does have depth and its own parallax.
Work-in-progress model of the Phong Phú Commune (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), image still from computer rendering, 2021.
Lifebuoy in still image from computer rendering.
Lifebuoy is a new sculpture made in continuity with Life Preserver + The Arrival for Te Magazine at the upcoming TANK Art Festival at TANK Shanhai. A total of 144 imitation beef and fish balls (鱼蛋 and 牛丸) are vacuum sealed into 16 packages similar to those found in food markets. They are then bound together using plastic strings that are vernacular to daily life in Asia Pacific. Inspiration for Life Preserver + The Arrival came after noticing how meatballs eaten in the food cultures of Asia Pacific have a tendency to float in the soups that they are served in. This style of meatball originated from the Southern Chinese who, just like their meatballs, were ‘buoyant’ in the liquids of the South China Sea as they sailed for new homes across the region. Lifebuoy accompanies the inaugural launch of Te Magazine, an art and anthropology publication. I contributed two recipes and a reflection on food that has been developed and adapted by the Chinese diaspora in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Lifebuoy, 21x21x1”, 2021.
Lifebuoy, Work-In-Progress documentation.
Lifebuoy with wall vinyl of Lake Ontario (Toronto, Canada) in still image from computer rendering.
Lifebuoy situated in TANK Shanghai, still image from computer rendering.
R&D Sketch for Workers' Dance (Young Workers, 2021), still image from computer rendering.
I am three months into my residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario to develop Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021).
Workers’ Dance casts 8 workers who are 35 or younger; who have had their employment impacted due to the pandemic-induced economic crisis, and who have received government financial assistance to offset or supplement their impacted income. 8 femme or queer identifying POC were cast from a pool of applicants who answered a questionnaire that was circulated online by myself, friends, colleagues, and the museum. The participants are paid for their labour and in the process I had become a small employer.
The artwork consists of two halves, the first is a series of headshot photographs in the style of Jeff Wall’s Young Workers (1978 - 1983), which my project is in reference to and is an homage to. The second-half consists of videos of the participants dancing to the telephone holding music from Canada’s welfare agency that provides funding to workers who have lost employment. The videos are produced by each participant in their own living space and with their own cell phones. I direct the mise-en-scène, provide resources necessary for the video recording, and edit the videos. These videos are finalized with the heads of the participants cropped-off from view, leaving just their headless bodies moving to the service agency’s telephone holding music. The videos are to be placed beneath the headshot photographs of each participant with ample space between the two components.
While Workers’ Dance is produced in the context to the current pandemic-induced economic crisis, I would like the artwork to be relevant beyond any one particular crisis. The artwork offers a picture of young workers in the early 21st-century. The project combines portraits of workers using conventions of socialist photography from the 20th-century, with a 21st-century visualization of workers that are vulnerable and awkward as they dance to a government service agency’s holding music in their own domestic spaces. This music plays as workers wait for subsistence from their applications to social welfare. In the 20th-century, portraits produced of workers in such an empowering manner were meant to re-center the workers and the peasants of the world in recognition of their labour as the creator of value, and to raise class consciousness to the importance of worker-led unions, parties, and of course, revolutionary action. In the early 21st-century, such a culture around workers and the militancy of workers seems to have disappeared. The 21st-century participants in Workers’ Dance dance to the music played by the state which provides a security net for workers. This security net is as much a provider of subsistence as it is also a pacifier for militancy. Marx’s old adage comes to mind: workers are free to work and free to starve. But what if the state steps in?
Jeff Wall, Young Workers (1978-1982)
Alexander Rodchenko, Pioneer Girl, 1930
Documentation of “The Young Comrade” Exhibition at The New Gallery, Calgary, Canada. June 2021.
An exterior image from “The Young Comrade” at The New Gallery. This public-facing curtain depicts a propaganda display that I saw at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution in Beijing. The propaganda display originally depicted public celebration after the Chinese revolution of 1949 in the formally-colonized coastal city of Tianjin. The 1949 revolution is a historical moment that The Young Comrade combines with a magic realist play by Bertolt Brecht.
The architecture in this display must have been dated to the early 1900s when Western-style architecture was either built by force within colonized Chinese territory by Western nations. I choose to display this curtain to the public in Calgary because it looks similar to the building that The New Gallery is a tenant of in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Calgary.
I was thinking about how this style of architecture could be found in the costal cities of China and also in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary. Both had forceful contacts with the West all the while Chinese coolies worked and died in both the trading ports in the colonized cities and also across Canada while building the Canada Pacific Railway. In Cantonese, letting the young men in a family go work as coolies for Westerners was euphemistically termed, 賣豬仔, or “to sell the piglets”.
