I hate feeling premonitions...

I finally put my chisels down yesterday. 

I have just concluded three full months of working with a mallet and carving wood at Bldg 110 LMCC Art Center at Governor's Island (and some overnight work at the apartment in East 44th). Also ended is a personal experiment where I tried to think and function the same way I do in Asia - working with traditional skills and a vernacular knowledge of art and its historical practices - testing these competencies in this city, New York, and how that persistence (or stubbornness) would affect me, especially as a person. I believe this is the sort of "program" that a grantee is asked to draw at the onset of his or her residency. In my case, the program developed organically as the result of thinking and assessment of four months of continuous engagement (with bouts of melancholic withdrawal) with living and working as an artist in the city. 

As a fellow and grantee of the Asian Cultural Council I took full advantage of this wonderful opportunity to be in New York. It wasn't really in my original proposal, but the ACC Board was gracious enough to invite me to do a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. To be honest, I came to New York without a single clue what I should be doing. I didn't even know I had a relative living in Queens, nor did I even have a single artist friend from the US. I really have to blame this circumstance to a spirit medium, who when I was 12, prophesied that if I should go to States, the plane I was riding on will crash. So, you have to imagine me, while the Korean Air flight was about to land at JFK and there was a freak snowstorm. I was thinking "Oh is this it? Is this it?" So coming to New York was like confronting pronouncements of what my fate should be. Good thing some oracles get it wrong.

I took the residency very seriously; a way bit too overzealous and intense in fact. As a wood carver, I sought wood - my materials - even going as far as hiking up to the wilderness of RingWood in New Jersey, near the stateline, during the first few weeks of wild turkey hunting season. But all that boom of gunfire made me edgy. I certainly do not want to be the first ACC grantee to be mistaken for wild turkey and get shot. That would be embarrassing. I would rather be mistaken for a bear, although in mid-March, these guys are still asleep.  

Eventually I discovered the best (but not the cheapest) way to get my material was to get them online, through Amazon. Till this day, whenever I am asked where I got my wood, I tell them I harvested them from the Amazon Forest. Same with the carving tools, the mallet, the drill...the whole workshop. Oh, HomeDepot pitched in a lot of tools as well. 

So, I carried these materials with me everyday from April to the first week of July, weighing 30 pounds at the most, from the apartment at 310 East 44th in Midtown, almost always by subway all the way to Governor's Island - and back. Elisabeth Smolarz, an artist at the LMCC Art Center, called my efforts "like Christ carrying the cross". That was incorrect: Christ made a one-way trip with his burden while I did more - around 180 trips. Also he had help with Simon of Cyrene. Then again, He was trying to go to Heaven, I was just trying to get away from Lower Manhattan, to get across the New York Harbor. 

Excluding the days when there was bad weather, freak late-winter snow (I hate the outdoors at 30 below), heavy summer rains, the occasional bouts of homesickness and sinus allergies, drunken Irish drinking parades, Falun Gong demonstrations, Egyptian rallies (their embassy is right next door), Coney Island trips to the sea: I religiously went to Governor's Island every weekday, to work for a minimum of five hours. I often found myself working alone in a studio for 16 especially after the end of May. Which was quite lonely, at times. Because staying beyond 6pm at the Studio and the Island is a federal offense, I bring my unfinished work back to Manhattan and continue my work in the apartment until late. 

I made around 27 individual pieces of hand-carved wood sculptures, two of which I exhibited in a solo show last June 1st, with more than a dozen unfinished pieces that I have to ship back home. Ten of these works are polychromed, and will be the core works for the upcoming Open Studio event on July 13-14. I also produced around 100 pounds of wood chips and cuts. As a testament to all that labour, I have incorporated that mountain of wooden debris into my final work. In fact I am shipping these to Singapore, to be part of my solo show in September. 

When I was done and I was beginning to arrange and design my space for the exhibit next week, I discovered that, as if guided by an unseen hand, I was making the installation more and more resembling the features and landscape of the NY Harbor. It was uncanny. You have to see it to experience what I am doing.

But contrary to what you may think that Ive spent months just buried in work when I could have taken advantage of the cultural and artistic events in the City, I did some exploring and was in every Art Fair from Armory to Frieze. I even spent more than three days in DC. True I have yet to go to more museums and more galleries, but I figured I have 30 days after my residency in LMCC to do that. In fact I have already begun last night when I attended a series of performance art pieces at CultureFix in Lower East, and an exhibition of the work of Mike Diana. 

To complete my program, however, I must also know what the community and some players of the contemporary art scene think of my work. The results were mixed: from insightful to downright disappointing. When the Cambodians came in May to do a month-long residency at Bldg 110, some of them, especially Sareth Svay and Vandy Rattana, (with the exception of Vollak Kong, of course) had occasionally gravitated to my workspace because they found my wood carving efforts resonant of their own work in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. SaSa Bassac (a contemporary space in Phnom Penh) director Erin Gleason even told me she felt "at home" within that space full of wood chips and carved torsos. During the first Open Studios in late May and in the exhibition at BlissonBliss Art Projects I  received a number of good responses, especially from those interested where I come from, and where the roots of my practice lay. But there were  a couple of curators who did studio visits to my space (events that artists from SwingSpace had to do ourselves because LMCC was amiss in this) and they dismissed my work as something "they will not make an effort to go far back to understand." Perhaps if I did exhibit only the residue of my work - the mountain of wood chips - I think that would please them more. It would be framed more contemporary, I think, with sarcasm foaming at my mouth. But as one of my friends had said: you have to mind how to locate yourself in the politics of space. 

In the end I wished I just took the residency in an enjoyable manner, like Tung Pang Lam. I envied Tung Pang's ease of work and his transformation of his apartment into a "Curiosity Box". But this is what took place and here is what I got myself into. No regrets here, only lessons.

And that (along with James Turell's penumbral work) I can take back home.  

Interesting things happened today at the Studio at Governor's Island. My work was politely and diplomatically dismissed by a curator. Far from upsetting me, I actually felt relieved. I wanted to gauge the reception of my work here. While I welcome all comments, I was keener to what criticism may come my way. In this way I know where my whole practice stands at the nexus of multiple points of view, especially in an art center like New York. 

I never participated in these curator visits at the studio, which was an activity organized by certain residents who pooled their contacts and resources, until today. I just found it too uncanny, although I respect it, for a curator to charge 25$ for a 20-minute visit. Most of the Asian artists whom Ive spoken to found this arrangement idiosyncratic. Some gallerists and art consultants I was told, charge even more. I guess it is accepted market practice. 

When I asked Jeff Leung to visit the studio last week, I introduced him to other artists in the building, and that gave me the idea to finally try joining their activity. 

While my scheduled visit is for a 30-minute thing from 1:30 pm, the other artists took more than an hour an a half and I ended up being the last person to be interviewed and was given only 20 minutes as she had to catch the 5pm ferry. I found the whole matter unfair and a bit discourteous as I did clear up my day to accommodate the visit and got to the Island at 11am. I felt the other artists were a bit competitive that day, jockeying for more time. But I tried to understand the context: they needed it more than I do. 

When my very limited time came and I explained that the nature of my work begins with an acknowledgment of tradition, the curator (whose name I will have to omit here, sorry) blinked and said she does not have any information of a) Philippine art or Southeast asian art and b) any craft-based and object-based theory that can help her understand my work. She then added that she does know about craft theory and the Japanese approach but she will "not go out and reach that far back", which was a polite statement for "I really dont want to make an effort to understand your work". 

I said I understood perfectly that my practice is a bit far removed from the non-object based, project-based art that seems to be the prevalent approach today. She smiled, offered some references and was guided off the Island by my very good natured neighbors. 

I was left thinking if I just actually wasted the day. One of the artists who organized the visit came up to me asked how my interview went. I told her it was unfortunately too brief and my work was too distant from her concerns so we did not connect. I added that I have resigned to the fact that I may not be able to find any contemporary curator in the city who can respond to practice. Even the curator was in fact saying, I should have gone to other States. When I was asked how did these episodes of misconnections make me feel, I simply said, it was disappointing but at the same time informative. It was not a pleasant experience to be dismissed, or be accommodated only out of condescension. I had a number of that within the four months I spent in New York. 

That does not sit well with me. But what can I do? 

Next time I will have to be cautious in presenting my work, and will have to pay attention to the public I wish to address. It is really a good thing that I am shipping my works all to Singapore by the end of the month. I don't think they belong here, anyway. Despite all our thoughts that art should be universal, my experience is living proof that works, often find their own viewers, their proper audiences. 

That will be what my position is when I present my work in the Open Studios in two weeks' time. It will be great if someone does feel resonance to my work, but I wont make an effort to convince people. I guess that's that. 

So I fell into a conversation with Ezra Wube and I asked him about the challenges he faced when he decided to move from Ethiopia and practice his art in New York. I admired his narrative of how he started with trying to keep himself rooted still with his Ethiopian lineage but soon realized that the conditions of being a migrant included the choice and the chance to untether yourself from the burden of homeland and reinvent yourself as an individual in the City. As he did this, his work began to shift from traditional oil on canvas paintings to video, sound and installation. But it was a matter of contingency, as he realized his paintings were not being noticed and presenting himself as Ethiopian would not really matter. And of course, video and installation where tools that were inexpensive, very mobile and quite easy to present. But now he realized that he feels being in limbo, without a sense of belonging to either his native Ethiopia or New York. 

I remember on the feery trip to the isalnd that morning I was surprised to find out that the curator chatting with the rest of artists and I overheard them talking about their travels to Asia, especially to China and Korea. They were complaining of the difficulties of communication, especially the way Asians avert their eyes during conversations. They found this to be very weird. I wanted to interject and say "in Asia it is rude to stare into one's eyes unless one is very quite familiar with the other", as there is a prevalent notion of "saving face" among the people. But will they even listen? I walked past them, each fawning over stories of how they were able to travel to Asia and interact with such a people. 

I guess they are not the descendants of Colombus and the conquistadors for nothing. And I am just a visiting Pacific Islander, a bit kooky, but just the same: an Other.