Human Skins - painting series
(To know more about this project, please see the following video and artist statement)
Human Skins Project
Artist Statement
In my art practice, contents always overrule the forms and methods. I choose to use different methods and media according to the concept for my projects.
This series was initiated by the headline news on the refugee crisis a few years ago. I went to the thrift stores where many new immigrants frequently shopped their clothes. I was fascinated by the clothes that they were wearing, because those clothes were worn by the wealthier people first, and then donated to the store for the poor. So, those clothes had experienced many lives, from the upper class to the working class, from the Americans to the immigrants.
I considered those clothes as the new “Human Skins”. Different from our natural skins, they are our Social Skins, which across all races, ethnicities and social groups.
Inspired by the books such as “The Uninhabitable Earth”, which claimed that environmental changes had caused the human sufferings, I painted the background with the theme of the aftermath of a natural or manmade disaster. I then used a house cleaning mop to break the images into abstract shapes.
For the collage process, I first unstitched the clothes into pieces. It’s very tricky to calve images on a fabric, because the material is soft and elastic. To solve the problem, I used the flour paste to harden the fabric. I cooked the flour with cold water and gradually heat it up, to prevent the clunky lumps. I also add some alum in the paste to prevent the insects to eat them. It’s an ancient Chinese method to mount the silk paintings or window screens.
Once the surface is dry. I used knives to calve the fabric following images that I drew earlier. I have to be very careful for the amount of cutting force, to prevent cutting through the canvas. Then I peer off the unwanted part of the fabric by hand to reveal the under-layer paintings. I usually laid several layers on top of each other according to the compositions. I also painted more images on the fabric after calving them. So, it’s a giving and take, pushing and pull mental process.
From surface, they are visual sensations of colors, shapes and textures. But what interested me are the stories behind them. Watching a shirt from the debris of the WTC, a shoe in the rubbles of a bombed village, and a skirt floating around a sunken refugee ship, any arguments about the “sublime of the abstract art” is anemic to me.
I call this body of work as the “Social Abstract”, a pun on the “Socialist Realism” that I grew up with in China. It’s also my critique to the “Zombie Formalism” that is popular today.