Gifts of Winter

Gifts of Winter
Diptych
Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
24" h x 12" W
2012

The 7th from the series Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie.

The chestnut and the batnut (water caltrop). Neither are nuts, but are both starchy fruit. To me, they're both associated with winter, cold weather, rain, fire, and general deliciousness.

Batnut, which is often confused with water chestnut (talk about a double misnomer) is the fruit of the water caltrop, a water plant. It has a blackish hard shell with very pointy ends. You must skillfully bite each in half in the middle, and if you do it right, the white flesh would pop out from each half. If you don't crack it just right, much of the meat can be stuck in the pointy ends and you have to dig it out. This was a favorite winter snack food in Taiwan -- we often sat around eating batnuts while watching tv on cold, wintery nights. I missed it terribly for a long time, and the first time I returned to Taiwan in the winter time, my mother bought me some. They were no longer being freshly cooked and sold by street vendors, and the pre-cooked nuts were disappointing. I haven't really wanted any since, and I do find that a bit sad. I think next time I go back in the winter, I should try them again.

The chestnut is the winter holiday thing — stuffed in turkeys and I always associate it with Christmas because of that song. As I was researching this piece, I found out that a neighbor down the street has a pair (you need two to have fruit), and she said that I could have as many as I want, as they haven't figured out how to get past the prickly shells! So I shall experiment with that this winter.

Here's how the piece progressed. In contrast to the previous 6 pieces, I did not have this piece fully sketched out before I started. I knew some elements — that it would be vertical, that it would have water & the batnut in the bottom panel and the chestnut in the top, that there would have a snowflake-like structure surrounded by fire in the middle. But that was it.

The snowflake, waves and the water caltrop started to go in first, followed by the stars of a cold, snowy, winter night:

The fire, the mountains, the duckweed:

At this point, I was very unhappy with the piece. I thought the bottom half was very uninteresting. After playing around with different ideas, I decided to add a favorite winter bloom, the camelia. So here I've scrubbed out parts of the bottom panel and sketched in the camelia flowers:

Camelias are now fully operational, and the mountains got some snow:

The chestnuts are flying because it's a cold, blustery, winter day:

And of course, it would not be a Pacific Northwest winter without the rain. In Chinese, the constant light rain that we have in the PNW is called "furry rain," and I do love to render those fine, fine, furry lines. So I made it rain that furry rain, and the finished piece is the top image. And more camelias.

Double Vision Confusion

Double Vision Confusion

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

The 6th from the series Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie.

Another piece about rice and wheat; the 1st piece was It's Complicated and can be seen here.

After I finished It's Complicated, I felt there was more to mine on that topic, partly because those grains are such a big and confusing part of our lives and also because I had so much fun painting the wheat fields and rice paddies.

A hole in the wall is a phrase that is often used to describe a small restaurant that might be easily missed but is quite good. It is also a phrase that often is used to describe an ethnic restaurant that is run by an immigrant family. These small restaurants are often our first exposures to another culture.

In a way, we're looking through these holes in walls for glimpses of far away lands and cultures. And it's a jungle out there!

Those are the ideas in this piece. The backgrounds of the two halves are based on two historical wallpaper patterns — the oak leaf pattern of William Morris and a chinoiserie palm tree pattern. The oak and the palm are trees often connected to wheat fields and rice paddies. The two holes in the walls turn into a pair of binoculars through which a hidden person gets glimpses of distant lands. But while she's looking at far away places, she misses the small critters that are near her — field mice and paddy frogs, two species that live in close proximity to our grains.

Here's how the piece started:

The background on the wheat panel and the wheat fields are going in:

I changed my mind about the storming sky in the wheat fields:

The field mice are in:

The frogs, rice paddies, and palms are mostly there:

The coconuts, the grain in the middle. I intended for the grain to bring to mind the 3rd eye. The circle in the middle is originally the focus knob on the binoculars (although quite enlarged), and I liked the idea of the connection between "focus" and the 3rd eye:

And here the grain is starting to take on a religious look. Not my intention, but it's interesting to me that the shape evokes the outline of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The cell structures look a bit like stain glass, too. Neither were intended, but I like the result:

The finished piece is the image at the top where the central medallion is more grounded.

It's Complicated

It's Complicated

Diptych
Gouache, acrylic and glitter on paper mounted on birch panels
24" h x 12" W
2012

The 5th from the series Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie.

Rice and wheat, two of the more common grains people consume in East Asia and in North America They have played a big part in how well humans have prospered — they could be stored for a long time, and refined grain even longer. But we have a complicated relationship with them in modern society. In cultivating them, we also developed a complicated relationship with the horned lark and the cattle egret, birds commonly found in wheat fields and rice paddies. The center medallion is the insulin molecule, and it's surrounded by 'sugar,' another thing that we have a complicated relationship with; both wheat and rice also turn into sugar rather quickly.

Here's the sequence of daily or every other day developments:

I'm waffling between doing terraced rice paddies vs paddies on the valley floor, so I'm playing with one and then the other.

In the end, I went with half and half:

The background is both sky and ocean:

And the birds went in:

The finished piece is the very first image at the top.

For the sugar, I played around with different options. I actually tried using real sugar. There was very little information about mixing sugar with acrylic paint (I would use acrylic as an adhesive). I tried using it as I would salt on watercolor, and the sugar melted and made a shiny, sticky mess. (I guess I could've guessed that.)

My critique group buddies suggested white sand for sand painting. I thought that was a great idea and went searching for white sand. But that was actually harder to come by than I figured. In wandering around the aisles at Michael's, I found this granulated glitter, which actually looked A LOT like sugar. And that's the 'sugar' around the insulin molecule.

1st Gocco Print Drawing

Yurt
Gocco print (silkscreen), 2001 or so

This was inspired by a visit to a Kazakh family's yurt in an oasis town somewhere along the silk road. I don't remember the exact town, but was probably around Turpan, Xinjiang, Chinese Central Asia. I visited the area in 2000.

I'll be giving away several Gocco prints over the next few months, this is the 1st of the bunch. To enter into the drawing, leave a comment to this entry. I'll cover 1st class shipping within the US. If you're overseas, or would prefer another method of shipping, we can discuss.

We Eat, They Eat

We Eat, They Eat

Diptych

Gouache, acrylic and plastic bottle cap shavings on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24" W
2012

The 4th from the series Red Bean Paste & Apple Pie.

The title is a play on words and a play on content. Who are 'they' and who are 'we'? The whole series is about the dietary changes I had to make as an immigrant to the US from tropical East Asia. So in that sense, 'they' could refer to the people of tropical East Asia and 'we' the people of the United States. But I also want the title to evoke the idea that 'we eat what they eat,' and in that sense 'we' refers to the people who eat the fish, the 'they' of the title.

And what are the fish eating? In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there exists the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's approximately twice the size of the state of Texas. Fish mistakenly ingest the plastic, get trapped in the plastic, or  ingest the plastic as it break down, however slowly. Then we eat the fish.

Through the different elements in the composition (the cutlassfish, the salmon, and representation of the Garbage Patch), I want this piece to be both about my personal dietary changes and the inadvertent global dietary changes. So here's how this piece started — salmon 'in the north' and cutlassfish 'in the south.' Earth in the middle, with the Pacific Ocean rimmed by Taiwan on the left, Oregon on the right, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in between.

The cutlassfish, a fish of the warmer waters of the Pacific ocean, was one of my favorites growing up in Taiwan. It was usually cut into 2" segments and pan fried. It was easy & fun to eat, just one set of bones down the middle — you put one side in your mouth and the meat slid off the bones, and you do the other side. Here in the US, many people don't like to eat fish that are long and skinny, which is always perplexing to me. But in either case, the cutlassfish is not available here, and I missed it a great deal for a long time. I still miss it; it has become very expensive in Asia, and I haven't had it in years. The salmon is, of course, practically a religion in the Pacific Northwest. It is a fish that I like, although probably not as much as I like the cutlassfish.

I decided the starfish were too bold, so I made them smaller. In the smaller size, they also remind me of the 'stars & stripes' of the US flag. The "stripes" will come later.

I love the turquoise over yellow ochre combination (that's what's making that green of the Pacific Ocean).


I mixed a blue-black (ultramarine + lamp black) and applied it over the turquoise over yellow ochre in thin layers. That's what creates the variations. The salmon & cutlassfish are finished, and I have to figure out how to get the plastic into the Garbage Patch.


I wanted to use some real plastic garbage. Various artist friends suggested different ways of getting plastic shavings off bottle caps, and in the end, I decided to start with the cheapest method first — a 10 cent cheese grater I got at the thrift shop. It worked great, although it was quite the aerobic exercise. I grated enough to make a batch of 'paint' by mixing it into some acrylic paint and GAC500. I mixed a red-black paint because I wanted it to look like a wound.

I first experimented with painting it directly onto some paper. The plastic bits wiggled around and it was difficult to control the shape. And since that would be irreversible, I decided I didn't want to paint it directly on the painting.

Next, I painted it on a sheet of plexi placed over the painting (so I could see what I was doing). I figured that I could peel this off and apply it to the painting. Here's a shot of that.


It worked great. Except when I went to peel it off, it all came off in bits & pieces. I then tried to encase the plastic bits between 2 sheets of gampi. And that made a mess. See exhibit B:


In the end, I used my original test patch that I had painted on paper, just cut into the shape that I wanted. The finished piece is the top image. The shiny spot in the middle of the ocean is paint mixed with shavings off a plastic bottle cap. And as it turns out, the lumpy-bumpy, rubbery end result also looks like a scab. That was a happy accident.

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!