Her Love of Green Vegetables Reaches Mythical Proportions

Her Love of Green Vegetables Reaches Mythical Proportions

Diptych

Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24"
2012

The 3rd from the series Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie.

I seem to have mostly recovered from my hand injury, or at least have it under control. Since the beginning of the year, I've been spending hours a day painting, using little tiny brushes to create fine details. I had a break when I worked on The Laundry Maze, but went straight back to long days of painting after that. By mid March, I could not move my thumb, and it was painful. Then I had another break–a trip to Taiwan followed by a week of taxes, a week of helping another artist with technical stuff, and another week of kitchen remodeling stuff–before I returned to finish this painting. While I was in Taiwan, I was able to see a doctor, and my hand was taken care of. All without health insurance, and for a grand total of about $50. (Thanks mom!) Now I just have to remember to stop and move my hand around every hour or so, and do my therapy once a day. It all seems to be under control.

Ok, so some background on this piece:

Growing up in Taiwan, my favorite vegetable was the water spinach, a relative of the morning glory (another 5-petaled flower). I only had it once between 1975 (when I left Taiwan) and 1983, my first return visit. Later, when I visited Mainland China, our national guide found out that was my favorite greens, she called ahead everywhere on our itinerary, and we never failed to have water spinach on the table at every meal. And also never failed would the the local guides' remarks that I was "so easy to feed, because that's pig food!" It grows in such abundance and so easily that they feed it to the pigs.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, water spinach is not so easy to come by, but I love rainbow chard almost as much. And we all know that the unicorn goes with rainbow chard just like the water dragon goes with water spinach, but of course.

And here's how this piece started. For some reason, this reminds me of Cirque du Soleil:

Here I'm adding some water spinach leaves on stalks:

The water (a very famous body of water) and the water dragon are started:

And the dragon comes to life...?

Now I move to the other side; first the rainbow chard:

Then comes the sky and the unicorn:

And finally, the finished piece is the image at the top. There are a couple of things I might change yet, but for now, I'm setting it aside. I've started to prep the panels for the next piece. Might be able to finish attaching the paper to the boards tonight and start painting tomorrow.

Snack Attack!

Snack Attack!
Diptych
Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24"
2012

I love the corn cross section as a halo, don't you?!

This is the second from the series Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie, a project I'm doing with the help of a 2012 RACC Project Grant. It will prove to be a pretty intense year of painting—15 paintings by the end of October. My painting hand is already in a sad shape from long hours of painting for days on end. I have started to use a support glove while I'm working, and a stabilizer when I'm not working. And of course, doing hand exercises whenever I can. Hopefully, I will keep this in check. There are also enough other things going on right now that I take a day or two off from painting periodically.

So this is how this painting started—my favorite Thunderbird (Scott Tracy) riding side-saddle on a grilled corn on the cob missile, and Mr. Spock surfing in on a Pringle.



The sacred geometry design here is based on the corn (but of course) and once again the 5-petal shape of the potato flower. And while I was concentrating on painting the sacred geometry, I spilled a jar of paint on Scott Tracy. I did my best to clean it up, but the stain is permanent (and will be fixed later).



Right by the front gate of the junior high I attended in Taiwan, there was this vendor who sold freshly grilled corn on the cob (with lots of hot sauce!). He was there everyday when school let out. My friends and I would each get a corn on the cob and would eat them as we walked to our respective bus stops (absolutely contrary to what we had been taught—to never eat while walking). I would get home just in time to catch the Thunderbirds, a British puppet sci-fi show. After I came to the US, my American mom would always give me a small bowl of Pringles as a snack after I got home from high school, and I could watch Star Trek before dinner.



The finished piece is the top image.

Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill

Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill
Diptych
Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24" w
2012

Other than The Laundry Maze, I've also started working on my new painting project, Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie, a series of diptychs that will be exhibited in Seattle in September and in Portland in November. The first piece is Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill, a nostalgic look at one of my favorite foods from when I was growing up in Taiwan (fresh bamboo shoots) and how much I missed it when I first moved here. Both the bamboo shoot and potato are root vegetables that are fairly inexpensive (in the proper regions), and both are very versatile in terms of culinary use.

I did not return to Taiwan for 7 years, and one of the first things my grandmother made for me was bamboo shoot soup!

Here's a shot of how it started. You can see that I'm playing with some ideas that I ended up not using (the drawing of a sprouted potato on the lower right).



The bamboo's cellular architecture and the potato flower are both 5-segmented. And I use this 5-segment structure as starting points. I'm using sacred geometry to denote many things -- the cosmos, the planet, the divider and unifier of the two sides/panels, but also to create a sense of myth and mystery. But it also gives me the pleasure of playing with patterns, which I love to do.

Here it is, fairly far along.



And the finished piece is the top photo.

The Laundry Maze is up!

The Laundry Maze

The Portland Building Lobby
1120 SW 5th Avenue
Portland, Oregon

7am to 6pm, Monday through Friday
February 13 - March 16, 2012

Join me and walk through The Laundry Maze on these days

February 16, Thursday, 11am to 1pm
February 23, Thursday, 1pm to 3pm
March 2, Friday, 10am to noon
March 7, 11am to 1pm
March 13, Tuesday, 11am-1pm

I will be adding new material to the maze each week.

What is The Laundry Maze?

The Chinese laundry is an iconic thread of early China-to-US immigration story, and The Laundry Maze references this history to start a conversation about one aspect of immigration — that of the immigrants' changing professional identities.

Over the past few months, I reached out to immigrant communities through personal contacts, ESL classes, and adult literacy programs in Portland and also in other parts of the US. From each participant, I asked for brief descriptions/titles of their professions and jobs before and after they immigrated. Each pair of responses are then sewn on a shirt. Sketches of natural national boundaries — mountains, rivers, and oceans — are painted on the back of each shirt.

At the time of the exhibition's opening date on Feb 13, I have received about 70 pairs of job titles or descriptions. More data continue to arrive, and I will add these to the installation as they come in.

I started this project with a preconception — that most immigrants' after professions tend to be lower in prestige or social status when compared to their before positions. While this is true in some cases, I also find that many people are able to make lateral transitions, sometimes after a few years of additional schooling. Many participants are in this process now — either working or unemployed, but going to school.

As you walk through the maze, you can read and share the immigrants' experiences of changing professions. On another level, the format of the maze creates a sense of mystery and disorientation, sensations familiar to people finding their way in a new country.

At this point, I would also like to share a personal story. My grandfather immigrated from mainland China to Taiwan in the 1930s. After he married my grandmother, they tried several businesses before they found success with a dry cleaning/laundry business. By the time I came along, it was thriving. There was a room where all the cleaned suits, shirts, pants hung tightly on racks, waiting to be picked up. As children, my sister and I played hide and seek among the racks. Thus the seed for The Laundry Maze was planted.

The Laundry Maze gets physical

The Laundry Maze is the installation I'm doing at the Portland Building Feb 13 - March 16, 2012. There's been a lot of planning (a web survey, distributing postcard/flyer with self-stamped envelopes, connecting with ESL departments and adult literacy programs throughout the Portland area, asking friends who are immigrants, collecting shirts from friends...).

And now, things are getting physical...the first shirt has rolled off the production line!

I have gesso'ed 48 shirts (although I'm pretty sure I won't need anywhere that many; I'll probably need about 35 or so). So far, I have collected enough data pairs to sew around 2 sets of tags on each shirt. I'm also still setting up appts with ESL & literacy programs for the next few weeks. I will continue to add the tags while the installation is up. Hopefully, by the end of the installation period, I'll have 3-4 tags per shirt.

The back of each shirt will be a landscape sketch that I hope people can interpret in various ways. Each will be a sketch of mountains, rivers, and/or oceans, all natural national boundaries. But landscapes can mean so much in terms of what a 'home' is.



The front of the shirt will have tags of people's professions before and after immigration. Each pair will be stacked on top of each other; the "after" tag can only be read when you lift up the "before" tag.



The serger has been a great investment. It's handy in finishing the tags so that they won't fray as people lift up the before tags to read the after tags.

I have bought the dowels that will serve as the laundry lines, and the clothespins. I just need to finish sketching the remaining shirts, sewing/writing the remaining tags, then it's install, and the show opens!

2011 ornament

Back in the late 70s, we used to make Christmas ornaments as a girl scouts fundraiser. They were made from old Christmas cards, cut into circles which were then folded into triangles. The triangles were stapled together along the 3 edges, and 25 of these made a ball ornament. The bigger the original circle cutouts, the bigger the resulting ball. And of course there would be glitter on all the edges (to conceal the staples). We made huge ones and also little ones.

I hadn't made those in a long time, but decided to make another style of ornament from the 2011 cards. We don't get so many cards any more (since we don't send any...ahem). But there were enough cards with the right size images to make this. I used 4 cottage cheese container lids as the substrates, gel medium as the glue to cover the lids with scraps of decorative paper. With the plastic lids, I didn't need to worry about grain and I could use any little bit of paper scrap I had! Yippee! Wrapped gold ribbon around each of the segments and put one coat of GAC 500 over the decorative paper. The card cutouts were then collaged on after that. This is followed by gold paint along the edges...but of course!

The top shot is a star, from the Scarlet Star Studios.

Here are shots of a few of the segments. This is a snowflake from my mom.



Some Christmas stockings from a friend's mom.



From the famous Michael5000. Although I must say that, since he only spent 3.5 cents on this card, the paper is rather thin and weak, and it's not keeping the 2 halves open very well, against the push of the neighboring cards, which are clearly made of more stout stock. (OK, he might've said that he spent 35 cents on the card, but of course, I can no longer tell because the card is now cut up and glued to the ornament.) I even had to give it a little help by attaching another small piece of paper; but alas, it didn't help much.



And from a college friend and his wife.

Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie

Hey, I got my 2012 RACC Project Grant for Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie! Here's the intent for this project proposal:

"I will create a series of paintings using food as a metaphor to explore my transformation as a first-generation American. Nothing is more personal than each mouthful we put into our bodies, but what we eat and how we eat it are both seen as cultural and political indicators. I will use this duality to explore what it means to be an immigrant American by examining the changes to my diet and eating habits since immigrating to the United States. The paintings will be small format diptychs in gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on panels. This is the second of a multi-part series on immigration and migration."

I'll be starting to work on these paintings pretty much immediately. I've promised a lot of paintings, and at the speed I paint, it's gonna be a full time gig.

The first part of this multi-part series on immigration and migration is, of course, The Laundry Maze. Here's the proposal for The Laundry Maze , and here's the webpage set up for doing the survey.

You should, of course, help spread the word!

The third part is a book. It will be one-of-a-kind, and pretty big. At least as I see it in my head right now.

Two hummingbirds

Hummingbird of the Day, gouache & acrylic, 12"x12", 2011



Hummingbird of the Night, gouache & acrylic, 12"x12", 2011

Doing a commission is a lot different than doing something without a final client in mind, especially in this case where stories were provided, although I was able to add my own little twists to the basic premise. Definitely not the usual mode of operation around these parts where I'm making up the story as I go, and changing the rules as I go. The final images are above, here are some process photos:







Initially, I wanted the two pieces to be bolted together and so the rocks continue from the right into the left piece. But after I completed them both, I decided they were better on their own.

Two years and nine months later...

We have a book!

This was the book I started with an elderly WWII vet back at the start of 2009. His wife heard about the project I did at Rose Schnitzer Manor and thought I might be interested in working with him. And now two years and nine months later, I have completed the project!

The book is an edition of 26, Gocco printed on Nepal Heavyweight, a handmade paper from Nepal; each also has 5 etchings on cotton paper handmade by Helen Hiebert.

Here's a stack of a few books. The cover paper is handmade mulberry paper from Taiwan. The image is Gocco printed and then brushed with a foam brush.



The front & back covers, and the back of the accordion. The back cover is created using the same method as the front cover.



Detail on the back of the accordion. It's the melody from San Antonio Rose. If you know the song, you can follow along. Otherwise, it might just look like a landscape or the water.



The opening pages.



The first trifold. The brown paper with the etching is made by Helen and contains soil from the South Dakota farm that he was born and raised in.



The trifold opened up.



The second trifold. The blue paper with the etching contains water from the Pacific Ocean.



The trifold opened up.



The third trifold. The green-blue paper with the etching contains water from the Columbia River.



Opened.



The fourth trifold. The gray-blue paper with the etching contains water from the Willamette River.



Opened.



The last trifold. The brown paper with the etching contains soil from his Oregon farm.



Opened.



The closing pages.

Good news on the "pillow books"

Yippee! The University of Washington Special Collections just purchased all four of the "pillow books"! These were made at the beginning of my interest and work on progressive memory loss, and right before I started working with the elderly who are at various stages of dementia. I'm thrilled that they're going together to this wonderful collection. The UW collection also has a copy of all the books I created with the elderly.

So here are some images of the four "pillow books". There are more images and write-ups on all four books (and more) here.

Below, Random Cruelty



Tenuous Connections



A Dog's Tale



Cradles for Our Memories