Shu-Ju Wang (Poem by Emily Pittman Newberry), Water, 2014, (cover and interior), Clarence Ward Art L
Shu-Ju Wang (Poem by Emily Pittman Newberry), Water, 2014, (cover and interior), Clarence Ward Art Library.Elka Lee-Shapiro ‘18, former curatorial assistant in Asian art, conducted this interview with artist Shu-Ju Wang in July of 2018 as part of her exhibition, Centripetal/Centrifugal: Calibrating an Asian American Art.On March 12th at 3:00 p.m., Lee-Shapiro will return to Oberlin to give a Tuesday Tea lecture on the exhibition. For more information, visit the event page on the Allen’s Facebook. EL: I was thinking that we could start with some general introductory information, if you could talk about your work and interests more broadly, and any projects you’re currently working on.SW: My background is actually in high tech. My degree is in computer science, although I wanted to go to art school, but my parents directed me into engineering—which was fine—but once I finished school and started working, I started taking classes at a local art school. Back then it was the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, which was very close to my place of work. I started taking classes there and I started to exhibit my work in 1996. As for my interests, I would say that it took me a few years to find my footing and figure out the areas that really interested me. For the past decade I’ve been really interested in the type of catastrophic or really profound transformations in our lives. We go through transformations all the time, but it’s very slow, very… not noticeable, but I’ve been interested in those really huge, catastrophic transformations—so immigration, health, the environment—I’ve been working on those three specific variants. These last several projects I’ve worked on have really all been about the environment, but also about personal transformations. I worked with a transgender poet between 2012 and 2014 to produce an artist’s book. She’s an activist and she gave me a poem titled “Water,” and it moved between solid and liquid—ice and water—and she wanted it to read in the round. You would typically think of a book as having a beginning and an end, and she wanted to have something that was different – she wanted the book to not have an end. That took me a couple of years to work on and it was a really challenging project. Because the way the poem read, it made me think of her as a transgender person, and how we tend to think of things as being this or that—ice and rain, snow and rain—we think of these things as distinct, but they’re really not. It’s a spectrum, right? I’ve been playing around with this idea a lot, both in the environment and our relationship with the environment. That’s really what I’ve been doing for the last several projects. EL: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about Nigrum, the artist’s book that we’re including in the exhibition. SW: That book was inspired by this chili-eating contest, which was really this fun thing. I’m not sure what initially made me decide to make a book about pepper, but I saw the ad for the contest. I started looking into the history of spice and I was vaguely familiar about the spice trade, but pretty much everybody knows it was spice that set forth Columbus going around the globe. I started looking into that, and I was born and raised in Taiwan, and Taiwan was colonized by the same people—the Dutch and the Portuguese—who were also in the spice trade. I found that black pepper used to be such a precious thing—whereas nowadays, you go to any cheapo diner and there’s going to be pepper on the table—but it used to be such a precious thing. There was this story about, I think it was the Goths that were invading Rome, and one of the demands that was made was for peppercorn, so people went to war for it. For pepper to go from that kind of a status to just on a tabletop anywhere, I found that really interesting, so I started to research the history of the spice trade. There’s this whole colonization and that of course involves mass migration, but in this case, the people that migrated were the overlords, and the indigenous population suffered. In terms of the structure, I was pretty set from the beginning that I was going to use the palm leaf structure because that was a structure that was native to that region. The research for this book was completely on historical events—the transformation of the pepper from this valuable commodity to a very inexpensive commodity, and the mass migration of people through the globe.Shu-Ju Wang, Nigrum, 2008, Clarence Ward Art Library, Oberlin College. EL: Was the chili-eating contest in the US? SW: Oh, yeah. That was just at a restaurant in a strip mall. EL: How did you create the map on the back? SW: It’s a historic map that I found and then I manipulated it so that it’s a little bit distorted. It’s an altered drawing of the historic map.I like the idea of having the map on the back be broken up, because as you’re travelling, you only get to see a little bit of what’s ahead of you. With a map, you get to see this whole picture, but when you are travelling, you only get to see a little slice of the world of where you are. I liked the idea of having the map broken up and then you only get to see a little bit of it at a time. EL: Do you think of your art as political? SW: I don’t think about my work as political, but I think it’s not possible for my work not to go there. Somebody pointed out to me the other day that so much of what I do is about food and water, and obviously those are the two things that we need to sustain us. I’m interested in those two issues but not just as something that we drink and something that we eat. As soon as you leave those immediate needs—that we need to drink, that we need to eat—you go into agricultural practices, the food that we experienced as different classes of people, your social economic background, the politics… I think it’s just not possible to not go there, but I’m sure somebody else will find it entirely possible to just talk about food and water literally, but I guess this is just not how I think. I just find it so easy to go from A to B, to B to C, D to D and pretty much, I’m at Z. One thing leads to another, I guess. EL: Do you think of your art as, if not political, do you think you serve also a role as an activist through your art? SW: I don’t think of myself as so much of an activist in that I’m just saying, “This is what I know. This is what I think I know from what I’ve learned, and I’m just presenting it to you.” I’m not going to try to convince you; I’m just saying this is my point of view and this is what I have learned. Of course, everything that I’m presenting to you, I know I’m filtering it for my audience. I’m not just throwing everything in and saying, “Oh, here it is, you deal with it.” I’m filtering it, and so it is not unbiased and I know that, but that’s what I get to do as an artist, and not just present one point. I think of an activist as someone who is much more actively trying to get their point of view heard, trying to get their point of view seen. I don’t think I’m trying to get my point of view heard, trying to get my point of view seen—I’m just saying this is my point of view. If you want to hear it, see it, great; if you don’t want to, that’s fine too. Of course I think my point of view is correct, which may or may not be true, but obviously I think it’s the right one or I wouldn’t hold it.EL: You mentioned earlier that you were born and raised in Taiwan. How does your personal background inform your work? SW: I was born and raised in Taiwan and came here as a 15-year-old by myself without my family. I lived with an American family, Anglo-American family, so I had this immersive Anglo-American experience, which is very unusual for immigrants. I had this very discrete line of immigration—one day I was living with my family, and then the next day I was with an Anglo-American family. That’s very unusual for an immigrant, because they come usually with their family, or if not, they’re within a community that they’re somewhat familiar with; whereas, I arrived and didn’t know any Chinese people. I did this big painting project in 2012 using food as a metaphor. I did these diptychs, and on one side was the food I ate before I immigrated, and on the other side, was food that I started to eat after I arrived.I have been here since 1975, and pretty much living within the Anglo community. My husband and I went to China for the first time in 1997, and in 1997, China was very much like what Taiwan was like in 1975. When I arrived in China, I had this sense of “Wow, this is like home.” I felt so comfortable there, even though I couldn’t really read simplified Chinese, but just the built environment was very similar to what I remember being the built environment in Taiwan. The public transportation was very similar to what I remember in Taiwan. Even down to the propaganda that they would paint on the concrete walls, “love your country” or whatever, ‘don’t spit,” things like that. I was like, wow, “I’m home” and there’s just such a comfort level. I think people congregate not for political reasons, not necessarily for nefarious reasons, but just for comfort. There’s a lot of comfort in being surrounded by people who look kind of like you. What’s interesting is that when I go to Taiwan now, I don’t feel that way, because Taiwan is so different from what it used to be like when I was living there. When I go there now, it’s like a foreign country. -- source link