Subsequence blog

We're home, we're back to working at the restaurant and school starts today. I tell people who ask me how China was, that it was unreal, I can't believe I was there and it happened at all. Three weeks with good people and an amazing staff and the a 5000 year old country named China.

Most of all the biggest affect China had on me was my work. Art had to be created in a mobile on the go setting among a different and old culture, mostly walking around the big cities of Beijing, Shan Dong and Shang Hai. Among a saturated city with good people where contemporary Chinese art has been having a renaissance, we explored wide-eyed Jin Mao Tower, original cite of the Communist Congress and my favorite The Shang Hai Museum, The shang Hai Museum of Modern Art and Shang Hai Biennial. All the big Chinese artists of the last 20 years had work there and it seriously pushed my mind to want to make art. And in the heat of the moment during our travels in China I pulled off some work, some complete and some left behind, like ink wash experimental drawings left hanging at our exhibition in Shan Dong, and some work not yet realized, like the six tapes of video footage waiting to be born into something. Work-on-the-go was challenging for me but I came through; for example, for our last critique in Shang Hai I was able to pull off some printmaking (with the help of some inspiration from Beijing printer Kang JianFei) which involved the six sides of a giant Mars eraser, left-over ink wash experiments, emergency asian paper, wood block and stamp pad, I was
able to come up with a "mono-print mass" yet to be signed, which, in it's presentation became a kind of emotional, visual and artistic view into feelings I had in Shang Hai.

With more work ahead of us at the Lavern Krause, I've been getting the buzz from emails, of a kind of Urban Street Scene Theme of China for exhibit at L.K. I'm into the idea as long as some visions of mine can meld with the theme. I would like to fully exploit and meld into the show anything we found or bought or drew or made, anything we as a group philosophized upon during our adventure. In China I had this feeeling the whole time that anything we did or brought couldn't go to waist, and China as a whole seemed so good at using materials. This to me sums up the feeling China had on me: this kind of on-the-go art work and overwhelming importance of material since we were all far away from home.

I think we can express that at Laverne Krause, certainly that is what my goal is.

Thanks, to be continued...