Effacement features both photographs and porcelains produced by the contemporary Chinese artist Huang Yan (b. 1966). Through these works, Huang examines the transnational art market and the perception of Chineseness in this environment. It is an unsettling vision. The artist selected blue and white porcelains, luxurious objects that were once exported from China and collected around the world, and shaped them into ordinary plastic water containers and liquor bottles, items of disposable waste.
In a photographic series, scenes from classical Chinese landscapes were digitally manipulated and reproduced on four whitened faces. The subject, merged with conventional landscape, is fugitive, his identity lost. Huang's engagement with commercialized culture may be identified with an aspect of Euro-American modernist art. Nonetheless, Huang's photographs and porcelains are bound up with local and specific meanings, which uncover the mutual implication of Asian modernity and orientalist fantasies.
Guest Curator: Anne Burkus-Chasson
