Snow in September

An exhibition reflection

 The Inspiration

After a few gloomy drizzling days of January in Manhattan, New York, the sky finally cleared. My wife and I wanted to have some fresh air outdoors in the afternoon. The weather was cold yet pleasant. When we walked passing the Westfield shopping mall, a replacement of the former underground shopping plaza under the old WTC building destroyed on September 11, 2001, my phone ringed. 

It was the curator/director of the HCC Gallery 221, Amanda Poss. She offered me a solo exhibition in her gallery on Dale Mabry campus in the spring of 2023. 

After the excitement and gratitude, I was calmed by an anxiety: what I am going to do for this show? I was torn by several directions and possibilities for this show. But one thing I was certain that it’s going to be all new works! 

In the past few years, my art projects had been developing in two tracks. One was a body of figurative work, dealing with the lives of Asian Americans, like the “Yellow Man” in the Skyway 2021 Contemporary Art Exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art. Another body of work were the mixed-media abstract works that I called the “Human Skins” series, employing recycled clothing materials to address issues of classes and environmental concerns.

While nursing ideas for the new show, we paced around the WTC memorials. The sound of the waterfall along the fountain wall echoed an orchestra of grievance, arousing a sense of veneration and tranquility. 

Through the reflection of the cloudy dusk in purple and white, gleaming between the etched names of the passed on the black granite, I remembered the Twin Towers falling. The white dust of debris tumbling down like snowflakes. Everywhere, everything and everyone were covered with white powdering debris in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, as if it was snowed that day.

The thought of dust from ruins becoming white snow struck me of another tragedy from another time at another place: the 13th century tragedy called Snow in Midsummer or Injustice to Dou E in antient China. In this tragic play, the unjust death of Lady Dou E caused the heavens to snow during a hot midsummer day, proving her innocence. 

It came to me that the dusts of ruins falling like snowflakes from the twin towers are the signs from heaven to convince us the continuing existence of unjust and anguish for which our humanity endures.  

At that moment the epiphany came for my new show: Snow in September.

In my art practice, contents sometimes dictate forms and methods. With a conceived idea, I experiment with a choosing media, such as painting, sculpture, photography, video, conceptual, performance and installation art, etc. Although the platforms are different, I intend to weave a tapestry of my vision of the world, led by a consistent thread: the fear of inexorable cataclysm. Born through the hard time of the Cultural Revolution in China and living in America as an outlier for 37 years, I focus my art on the world’s struggle between nihilism and optimism, from the standpoint of a diaspora. 

Human Skins 

In past few years, I have been working on a series of mixed-media projects titled “Human Skins”, by using clothing materials collected from the thrift stores. I imagined those clothes as the “human Skins” that have lived through many social environments, as a metaphor. They started with the lives of the wealthy, then transitioned to the bodies of working class or the immigrants. Those “skins” experienced many different living circumstances within our society. Different from our natural skins, they are our social skins, which are across races, ethnicities, genders, economics, political and religious believes. 

Using found objects to make art, I also strategize my critique to the notion of "artistic purity” that was once dominated the art world (Clement Greenberg).

Like any artists, I enjoy the design and process of art making, to make the abstract paintings colorful and compositionally dynamic. Yet, I also want to remind the viewers to not only be satisfied by the visual sensations, but by the stories(concept) behind those colors, lines, shapes, textures, and materials. 

I believe it’s the artists’ obligation to respond to our social surroundings. When facing human tragedies, such as watching a shirt from the debris of the WTC site, a shoe in the rubbles of a bombed village, and a skirt of a sunken refugee washed to shore, any arguments about the “sublimity and purity of art” seem anemic.

Like artist Mark Bradford, I call those abstract mixed-media work as “Social Abstract”. It’s also a pun on the “Socialist Realism” that I grew up with when I was a kid in China. It’s my critique to the “Zombie Formalism” that is popular nowadays.

Snow in September

Back to the “Snow in September” exhibition. 

I planned to use the similar approach as my Human Skins series, with a focus specifically on the tragic event of 9.11, in this case.

In the Human Skins series, before putting on the layers of fabric/clothing materials, I started the background with images of devastating tragic events, such as droughts, forest fires, tsunamis, or environmental disasters, etc. For the same approach in the Snow in September series, I begin the background with photo images of the aftermath of 9.11 that I researched online.

The background images were painted realistically first, and then they were covered by layers of paint and fabric materials. The hidden strata of information were concealed from the viewer. It’s like to bury a hint of plot at the beginning of a novel by a writer, until it surfaces by the end. After the realistic backgrounds were covered by clothing materials and paint, layers by layers, they were developed into seemingly abstract paintings, with the remaining concept underneath.

One of my delights of making art is that it allows me to play the “hide and seek games” visually and conceptually, particularly within the syntaxes that are deemed antediluvian or outlandish according to the conventional canons. I appreciate the jargon by the computer nerds: WYSINWG (What You See Is Not What You Get). It’s true in art, as well as in life.

As part of the “game”, I documented the process of the development of my paintings, from photorealism to abstract mixed media. To lure my audience playing the “game”, I displayed a QR code next to the painting, so they can follow the step-by-step process of the makings online.

White Clothes

Inspired by the Asian paper cuts, I composed the designs on the clothing materials on top of the background paintings, as plants and animals in the natural world, forming abstract shapes and pattens.

Different from my previous work, this time I chose all white clothing fabric for following inspirations:

• White is a color of mourning in Asian culture.
• WTC was an office building, and most people wore white shirts to work. My memory was engraved by the images of white clothes falling from the Twin Towers that day, particularly the image of a falling man in white chief uniform.
• The falling dust and debris were like the white snowflakes in the sky and on the ground.
• White clothing materials have the translucent quality, which can partially cover and reveal images underneath. Layers of white fabric can convey a sense of mystery, ambiguity, and uncertainty, like frosts blurring our fading memories.
• White has a sense of spiritual manifestation.  

Remake History

If you are a visual artist, particularly a painter, you may have the experience that you have to give up a part of the painting that you really love, for the sake of the overall design or concept of the painting. Once the part was covered by another layer of paint or materials, it only exists in the artist’s memories, with some regrets.

During the process of making the Snow in September series, from photorealism to abstract layering with brushstrokes and fabrics, I inevitably had to cover some parts of my paintings that I wish to see them again. I wish my painting had a “History” function, like the Photoshop software, that allowed me to save “snapshoots” for later while continuing the creative process. So, I took snapshots of the parts that I loved to keep as memories.

When displaying those documentary photographs in my studio, it struck me that they could be paintings on their own. I began to paint them by following the snapshot photos. The more I developed, a new version of paintings emerged from the originals. They looked similar yet different.

To give those paintings new meanings, I titled them according to the music and audio books played in my studio, or what I saw on TV. I also titled those paintings based on the books I read during that time, for example: Norwegian Woods (Haruki Murakami), Quiet Flows the Don (Mikhail Sholokhov), Ferryman (Claire McFall), etc.

That made me think: is it the same way for the development of our human history? Same historical event can be interpreted differently by time, geolocations, and peoples of power…

When discussing the Historical Discontinuity, Foucault commented that the flow of history and the fact that some "things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way" from one era to the next.

Many of my students are born after 9.11. They do not have the memories of this tragic event. Their knowledges about this human loss are based on other people’s reinterpretations and their own understandings, which could be partial, less factual, and even misleading. 9.11 was only 20 some years away. How many stories and the truth had sunk down the bottom of the river of our human history?

By retelling the tragic stories, can we find solace, inspiration, beauty, and spirituality in our humanity?

The Gallery

Walking into the HCC 221 Gallery, the audience are facing four 7.5’x5’ vertical panels against the glass window walls. They reminded me the vertical orientation of Asian paintings, particularly the Song Dynasty landscape paintings. Following this inspiration, I hung four of the 5’x’5’ Snow in September paintings in the order of winter, spring, summer, and autumn, from left to the right on the panels. Those “landscapes” provided a sensitivity of peace, comfort, comeliness, and hope, despite the bitter subject.

On the opposite side walls, two of the Twin Towers paintings were installed facing each other. A OR code was displayed next to the paintings, which directed the viewers to view a series of images of the history of the creation of the paintings, from documentary photography to mixed-media abstract layering.

On the glass window wall of the gallery that parades the views of the adjacent buildings, I installed the white snowflakes as if they were still falling. The white snowflakes were the negative cutoffs from the cloth materials that I used to make the Snow in September paintings.

Echoed to the snowflakes, the gallery was permeated with an ambient sound of the 13th century opera of the Tragedy of Dou E, Snow in Hot Summer…

In the hallway of the gallery, hundreds of photos were systematically installed wall to wall and ceiling to floor. They were the photo documentations of the sections of my paintings that were covered during the development of the painting/collaging process.

My “remake” paintings that were based on the photo documentations were installed inside of the gallery at two corners. They were in varies sizes and were displayed in random compositions, like our memories fluctuating in fluidity.

Facing the door of the gallery outside, two of my large Human Skins paintings were installed, to give the audience an introduction of the starting point of the making of Snow in September.

Snow in September exhibition was scheduled on view from March 23 to May 11, then extended to June 22, 2023.