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Horatio Hung-Yan Law was born in 1955 in Hong Kong to Chinese parents and moved to New York at age 16. But it wasn't until the artist moved to Portland to be artist-in-residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft that the experience of early Chinese immigrants became a primary inquiry in his art. His current exhibition includes four groupings of objects, the most impressive being The China Wall, a 25-foot-long wall installation of 99 plates and small bowls that Law purchased at second-hand shops and painted a matte cobalt blue. In the center of each plate is an abstracted, luminous image of a river rock: Law scans his photographs of rocks into a computer, where he inverts the image values. He then makes laser prints on transparency stock and covers the backs with faux gold leaf. With its references to the history of Oregon and of Chinese art, The China Wall is the exhibition's best-conceived and -executed piece. Cobalt was widely used as an underglaze in the precisely decorated blue and white porcelain wares created at China's imperial kilns. Law uses this pigment to cover the plates' surface, which he relates to the anonymity that American society imposed upon the Chinese immigrants. Yet the structure, shape and size of each plate is unique. Many Chinese immigrants to Oregon worked gold claims for white people or worked in previously mined claims. Due to their thoroughness, they were able to mine gold that whites had overlooked. As they searched, they piled rock along the river's edge, creating a "China wall." The installation's title also alludes to the Great Wall of China, which was constructed around 200 B.C. to protect the new empire of China from the "other," a term that also describes the Chinese immigrants in the American West. Additionally, Law points out, it draws associations with the china cabinet. "It is about making the anonymous exotic, and the familiar alien, or vice versa," he says. To the Chinese, nine is a lucky number that connotes longevity, which prompted Law's decision to use 99 plates. It's also just shy of 100, connoting Chinese excellence without full acceptance by their white counterparts, who were simultaneously envious and disdainful of the Chinese ingenuity. The second group of work consists of four pieces, each of which includes four to six square, slate tiles painted a bright, solid color (purple, orange, red or brown) and mounted to plywood. Law sandblasted the slate with the decorative patterns used for windows in Chinese gardens. Then he filled the recesses of the pattern with photographs manipulated with the same technique as the river rock pictures. In two of these pieces the images are of clouds, in two they are of currently existing structures near Pendleton, where many Chinese miners lived without windows in underground communities. In a diptych of a similar style, the slate was sandblasted with several squares arranged in the shape of a cruciform. Within these squares are photos of decaying peaches, which look as much like folds of skin as they do fruit. Law juxtaposes an Eastern symbol of long life, the peach, and the Western, Christian symbol for the resurrection of Christ, or life after death. This pair alludes to The China Wall in its reference to continuance, yet it and the other slate pieces are not as resolved as the installation, technically or aesthetically. The final group of work is composed of two European-style men's dinner jackets made of hemp, the material used to construct the effigies of material goods that are burned at traditional Chinese funerals as offerings to the ancestors. One is covered in jasmine tea leaves, a readily available product that the Chinese associate with relaxation and enjoyment, and the other in gold, representing the prosperity and material wealth of the United States. Western dress is covered with Chinese symbols, the reverse of the china plates being painted to mask their "Chineseness." In one of his previous bodies of work, Law photographed himself in poses readily associated with subjects in well-known historical paintings in the Western canon, such as Edouard Manet's Olympia and Jean Ingres' Grand Odalisque. Law continues to assess the identity issues that accompany the Chinese assimilation to Western culture and lifestyles. This present body of work, while being more specific to Oregon, is a successful, though somewhat enigmatic, step in this pursuit. |
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