Sep
19
Wednesday September 19, 2018 - Friday November 9, 2018
On campus in the art gallery
Posted in Art Exhibitions, Arts & Culture
Opening: Wednesday, September 19, 5-7 p.m.
Runs: September 19 – November 9, 2018
Through mixed media paintings and drawings, JJ explores the “chop suey,” hyphenated culture that is created when East meets West through immigration and colonization.
ReOriented is the centrepiece of the exhibition: a scroll extending over 60′ of gallery space, engaging the 1000-year-old Chinese tradition of hand scrolls. The piece appropriates images of Chinese-Canadian food such as Sweet & Sour Chicken Balls, juxtaposing them with ‘authentic’ Chinese food such as road duck hanging in a window.
Lee’s layered visual language explores the space between states of being, cultures, histories, and identities. Reconstructing the “mashup” and intersections of Chinese and Western cultures on a flat picture plane, she mixes pictures from diverse sources. For example, Lee deploys Chinoiserie patterning, the European blue and white porcelain patterns such as “Blue Willow” that were inspired by 14th-century Chinese originals, featuring Chinese scenes as imagined by European designers. Re-invented and hybrid identities result from these combinations. Like language, sometimes meaning gets changed in translation.
The intersection and confluence of Eastern and Western culture produced an interesting hyphenated space that persists today.
