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.
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