“What is here? What is there?” USA:China Scrolls

I was invited to a residency in Beijing for 2 months. One of millions of other fellow immigrants to Beijing, I couldn’t read signs, speak one of the 2000+ chinese dialects and knew no one!  I reframed my thinking by asking the questions, “WHAT IS HERE?… WHAT IS THERE?” while in China. Its impossible in these short notes to summarize the many insights, contradictions and cultural similarities that showed up during that October and November.  A strong one however is that “Beijing-sized” makes “Texas-sized” look dinky.  I felt miniaturized.  Also, the Chinese I met are like me with passionate notions of change about their way of life, too.  Observations of power and wealth were similar, too. Greed and lust for power have no borders.  

I have never been told what to make as an artist in the US.  In China, that is not the case.  US citizens have freedom of speech, so speech is taken for granted and undervalued. In China, artists threaten the status quo by questioning authority. There wasn’t an artist I met there who felt China was opening up fast enough.  Ai Wei-Wei agrees.  As an example, my husband, jeweler Scott Keating, and I were touring the galleries in the art district called “798”.  We came up some stairs to meet face-to-face, 2 fully armed army guys guarding the door to The Ghao Brothers studio gallery.  If you were Chinese, you couldn’t go in.  The Ghao Brothers weren’t allowed to leave China for 17 years.  International interest in their work eventually broke this down.  The internet is essential for this.  I asked what happened and one brother said, “The government realized in the end that we were just artists and let us out due to the pressure.”  What was opening around China to acts of personal independence, is now closing up fast. The steel fist tightens.

People interpret what freedom is in many ways.  In the artworks seen here with chinese characters, the characters spell “FREEDOM”.  I ask, freedom to pollute? ..to be brand name consumers?.. free to speak?  Its all happening at once.  This is the question that has stayed with me since visiting China.  Chinese want what the US has.  We need to be vigilant to preserve the best of ourselves.  We don’t have to be in China to lose our freedoms, either.  We can lose them right here.

 Ovo Topo Drawings

These works began as two-dimensional responses to The Egg Series. Layers of meaning of what is growing within the forms and outside the forms became a topographical investigation to yet another aspect of nature that I see in my self. As editor, Ron Kuchta, editor of American Ceramics Magazine has written, “"Her mystical works are intimate and relate not only the artist's personal quest for meaning in nature and within herself but also point to something of a universal need in this over-cultivated world... to reconnect...to accept a rebalancing of ourselves with nature.  Her works invite a sense of intimacy with nature, creating a physical place in which to do this rebalancing within oneself."