Solo Exhibition, Beijing Studio Center Gallery, Beijing China. August 3rd-September 3rd, 2010

Take Notice of Safe: [recycled organism]

Take Notice of Safe [recycled organism] is a solo exhibition of billboard sized prints at the Beijing Studio Center Gallery during the summer of 2010. The images in this body of work are a multi-layered combination of vector transformations of photographs I have made at current construction sites in China. These images depict new cell phone towers, construction cranes, and electricity wires as symbols for modernity and a highly evolved society. China has a long and ancient history which has the potential to teach humanity much about sustainable and collective living as well as symbiotic existence with the natural world. In this way China is very special in the context of human evolution. With this body of work, I am questioning the motivation and context for unfettered expansion and consumption by exploring the current landscape of China’s rapid industrial evolution at a time when oil and other important natural resources are beginning to become scarce. I am also concerned that if humans do not approach evolution and modernization in a more sustainable and environmentally sensitive manner, we will all be in danger of causing irreversible environmental damage on a shared planet which is both fragile and finite.

注意安全: [可回收的 有机的]

注意安全是在北京国际艺术交流访问中心画廊举办的街边大幅广告尺寸的作品展。 作品的图像是我在中国的工地上拍摄的矢量图的堆叠。图像中有新的手机信号发射塔，起重机，象征现代化和高速发展的社会的高压线。中国有悠久的历史，这样的历史有着教育全人类如何可持续发展、共同生存和与自然共生的潜质。这样，在人类的进化过程中，中国有着特殊的语境。这些作品表达了我看到的中国，在当下自然资源匮乏的时候，急速的工业革命，无限制的膨胀和过度消费，我对这些事表示质疑。我感到如果人类不能以可持续发展和更环保的方式来达到进化与现代化，那么我们共同生活的脆弱的有限的星球就会处于无法逆转的环境恶化之中。

More of the Lifestyle you Deserve is a series of photographs of the main pool at the Radisson Orlando Resort in Kissimmee near Celebration, Florida. Celebration and its surrounding environs are essentially an elaborate planned living community wherein the resort lifestyle blends “seamlessly” with single family living designed, marketed, and built by the Walt Disney Corporation. The town of Celebration itself is designed to resemble a small town, however it is indeed an inauthentic fake masquerading as main street USA. In many ways, Celebration and its integrated resort complex becomes the corporate manifestation of the original Disney concept of EPCOT (Experimental Prototypical Community of Tomorrow), minus the dome of course. Celebration accomplishes this grand illusion through the cursory satisfaction of the expectations that Americans have of facades and surfaces that should form the appearance of a public realm. Make no mistake, Celebration is an elite, private community and at best merely resembles a quaint, quasi-colonial, small town. With its empty, anti-self-aware, repetitive architectural nods to post-colonalism, Celebration ultimately reveals itself as a plastic enclave of empty luxury playtime. The repeated facades of uniform single family homes constantly broadcast the message of American domestic normalcy, conformity, conservative christian ideals, and store-bought social class. The images in this series deliver these metaphors through the isolated figures in a sea of diluted pale blue chlorinated pool water. The irony being, what appears to be a public realm is in fact off limits to anyone who isn’t a guest at the resort or doesn’t qualify to live in Celebration. These images are the psychological made visual, revealing what is concealed through the investigation of luxurious abandonment, deep-seated isolation, temporary borrowed wealth, and the inevitable crash that was built on a house of cards from the beginning. Welcome to the new Lifestyle… “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go…”

Click on the image to start the video. If the video does not start click on this direct LINK to begin the video.

(running time: 5 minutes)

This video has been accepted into e4c the 4culture.electronic gallery in Seattle, Washington for a one year rotation. Check the e4c website for the current programming schedule. We should know in a few weeks what month the video will begin its rotation.

The Ping Yao Continuum was shot inside the ancient city of Ping Yao, Shanxi Province, People’s Republic of China. Ping Yao is a well preserved walled city founded in the 14th century. During the Qing Dynasty, Pingyao was a financial center of China. It is now renowned for its well-preserved ancient city wall, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ping Yao is most famous for being the site of China’s first banking system. Once a powerhouse of banking and commerce, Ping Yao is now quickly becoming a destination for both domestic Chinese and foreign tourists from around the world. Ping Yao was the financial center of China in the late Qing Dynasty. During those times, there were as many as 20 financial institutions within the city, comprising more than half of the total banks in the whole country. Among these is “Rishengchang,” considered the first bank in China.

For now, Ping Yao is still currently a working and daily inhabited city. As China transitions into a world superpower, Ping Yao will transition into a tourist destination. I have been to Ping Yao three times over the past four years and watched as it has transitioned from a working city into a tourist mecca. Many of the city’s long-time domestic inhabitants are being relocated to apartments just outside the main city walls. The daily life and domestic rituals within the walls of Ping Yao are changing rapidly and it feels as if it is moving forward and at the same time going backwards. The video was shot during a lunch with a friend who grew up inside the city walls. The lunch was at a very local restaurant inside the walled city. As my friend told stories of growing up inside Ping Yao, a family of three ate just across from us. They watched us carefully, glancing and sometimes staring, politely of course, at our strange behavior.

This video is only 5 minutes of that family’s lunch at Ping Yao, in reverse. The entire video loop lasts a full hour and eighteen minutes. The food comes out of their mouths and is placed back onto the plates. Tea flows from within the body and returns to the glasses. Waitresses as well as customers walk backwards in subtle maneuvers inside the small local restaurant. At times it is nearly impossible to tell the video is running in reverse, and in many ways, China itself is often as impenetrable and unknowable. However, the simple ritual act of eating together at the same table is one of the most universal human experiences. Sharing a meal in any language or culture can be seen as a unifying domestic constant that serves to strengthen bonds between friends and family, solidify business relationships, and renew familial and domestic ties.

Much of what will become the new China in the coming decade will require a part of the old China to revert to a mirror image of its former self. Ping Yao will soon be that image, or simulacrum of a working city, existing as a historical and cultural relic for the delight of all who visit. The ancient walled city is at once moving forward and backwards into a version of its former self. This video, The Ping Yao Continuum, is meant to express this tension by exploring the domestic ritual of a simple family meal inside the transitioning city, capturing a brief moment in time; and then extending it in reverse in an effort to prolong the experience of the present tense and savor the moment as an isolated, universal, ritual experience.

Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, March 2009: Installation Documentation

Using textures and abstractions photographed in China, I am examining the present culture and lifestyle of the ancient cradle of Chinese civilization which is Shanxi Province and the current cultural and political cradle which is Beijing. Shanxi Province has a deep and rich cultural history that is thousands of years old. Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, has recently emerged as a major industrial city, fueling the growth of China with much needed energy resources. The entire body of images weave together images of fragments and pieces from the present and the past found in these two extraordinary, historically significant places in China. The entire body of work ultimately suggests a rich cultural past overlaid on a future which is both full of challenges and hope as China transitions into an international super power.

All of the prints in this series are archival inkjet prints (Canon Lucia) made from digital photographic source files. Each print is 24″x43″ and printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag fine art watercolor paper.

Like a concert tour, but with Sketchbooks.

Over 2,000 artists from around the country were sent a small Moleskine sketchbook. Their task was to fill the book with “everyone we know”. Visitors are encouraged to pick up the books and freely browse through them.

The images in the series 40-60 are constructed from photographs made while I was
working in Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province, China in 2005. The titles refer to the way in
which the people I met discussed the current opinion of Mao. When I would ask about
how they viewed the current influence of Mao, an over arching generalist response was
“60% good and 40% bad.” I reversed those numbers by then end of my time in Taiyuan,
as I became increasingly aware of the impending eco-disaster there.
Taiyuan City is first in terms of cities with the worst air quality on earth mostly due to the
emissions generated by coal burning power plants. Additionally, it has one of the highest
ratios of actual to potential desert on earth. Taiyuan has about 3.5 million people living
there, it is very quickly running out of water and is on the verge of becoming one of
China’s worst eco-disaster that no one has ever heard of. Despite all this, Taiyuan
continues to build.

A collaborative series of drawings with Kirsten Rae Simonsen about the perils of domesticity.