David Perry, Three Passages: Double Happiness, Child Palace, Small Offerings, 2009
- Colorfast children
Standing with our six-month old daughter Sophia in my arms outside Shanghai’s Art Labor Gallery, where my wife Monika Lin’s Child Palace is on display, I find it impossible not to think about the air we breathe, and what passes with it into our bodies. Large and fine particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, diesel fumes, construction dust—it’s all there. I convince myself I can taste it, even on this sunny spring day. It’s the city, it’s the sky, it’s the world over.
It’s the taste of capital materializing. Not only in the form of China’s coal-fired power plants, cars and factories, but also in the slick shapes of Shanghai’s new office towers, each an individual node in a global network teeming with data, a network that seems to shape our collective tomorrow with growing haste, violence and carelessness.
This is all in the work, too. Child Palace foregrounds the steady stream of contaminants emitted by and largely constituting what Monika, in her statement for the show, terms “an imposed landscape of grids, manufactured substances, and plastic environments.” The paintings do this with subtlety via the use of clear epoxy resin as base medium, and they do it flamboyantly by way of cartoon-creepy “gloopies,” faceless stamped figures and borderline-lurid blossoms.
In its engagement with such wide-ranging crisis, the work manifests a care, contemplation and steady deliberative hand that together create a momentary sanctuary, a space that stands apart in its small way from the seething, polluted world outside—just enough, perhaps, to help us see that world and our places within it more distinctly. And while the fact that “Child Palace” comes from the Chinese characters for “womb” gives rise to an uncomfortable irony in its juxtaposition of the toxic and embryonic, it also designates a space where we can pause, calmly reflect and reenter the air outside clearer in mind and vision.
Child Palace is the middle installation of what has emerged as a trilogy, preceded by Double Happiness and followed by Small Offerings. The three series share much among themselves even as they are marked by telling differences, creating a fluid discourse that ranges from the topical to the philosophical to the political.
In Child Palace, the patterned pill replicas that ground Double Happiness give way to a floating scrim of angles and trajectories as reminiscent of mapped highways and flyovers as they are of blown-up microchip circuitry. The epoxy that fixes and separates painted layers feels less like encapsulation, as it did in the psychopharmaceutical-themed Double Happiness, and far more like the very medium through which we move: the altered atmosphere of our time cast in plastic. Monika’s renditions of young people and children adrift amidst a high-gloss, intensely colored mix of arcing lines, ricocheting circuits, hothouse flowers and viscous dripping globs feels simultaneously tender and hard-edged, combining emotional give with sharp intellection. It’s as if the work were seeking to protect the right to feel or protesting a prescribed or engineered numbness—an effect shared across the trilogy.
In Child Palace, as in Small Offerings, these effects are heightened by the installation of soft-sculpture “gloopies” in the gallery space, which disconcertingly places us in the same relation to the polyp-like forms as Monika’s stamped and painted figures find themselves. The resultant shifts between the macro and micro, the external and internal, and the technological and biological carries forward from Double Happiness, though the emphasis turns from how internalized chemical and biomedical intervention shapes our bodies, minds and social worlds to the realm of built external environments at the level of city planning or information technology; now, Small Offerings appears to turn toward an even deeper consideration of the underlying issues.
In distinction to the new work, the first two installations raise their questions with disarming whimsy by way of color and simple images that hint at a host of familiar pop culture tropes. Take the bright shiny figures of the go-kart racers who pass through candy-colored spaces in Double Happiness and Child Palace. They open numerous interpretive avenues, yet they don’t hasten us down any particular one, leaving us free to enjoy the superficial play of color and images for their own sake, at least for a few moments until the pills, gloopies and other vaguely pathogenic shapes insist that we think again.
What is the relationship between Big Pharma marketing, psychiatry, children, and contemporary ideas about norms and aberrations? How does global corporate order/disorder us, and what’s happening within the complex relationships between technology, environmental degradation, “nature,” and human identity? At what point does the innocence of contemporary childhood sour into adult complicity? What do we give of ourselves, what do we lose, and what might we gain as we enter into transactional realms where our desire, fear, hope and despair risk becoming mere terms of exchange in a world all-too-often “managed” by the reckless, powerful and negligent?
Small Offerings moves to integrate these concerns, prompting a deeper line of inquiry: What remains when we give ourselves over to interlocking systems—corporate, state, financial, medical-industrial, data and information management—so completely that we can’t be certain any more where “we” begin and “they” leave off?
- Micro traces
Monika’s new work invites us to consider the nature of offerings, then plunges us into a strange, bleak, beautiful floating world populated by ghostly swimmers and divers passing through flotillas of Portuguese Man o’ Wars, mysterious globular excretions, and scattered supersized oleanders and chrysanthemums. So what, exactly, is offered here?
Small Offerings shares many of its stamped figures with Double Happiness and Child Palace: Helmeted boys careen through space in their go-karts, faceless girls appear to look upward in blank anticipation, kids balance on bikes, teens swing in swings, a young woman strides along with purse in hand. They move through the same spectral world as the swimmers, a world defined by both cuddly-creepy biomorphic forms and the circuits and pathways introduced in Child Palace extended here, it seems, to terminal ends.
One look at Small Offerings, of course, reveals the most striking departure. The seductive candy colors and retro kitsch hues are gone. The new works are marked by the reduction to whites, grays and silver, with a faint yellow or ultra-pale green tint imparted by the layered resin, evocative of bleached reefs, silted waters, industrial pall. A sense of loss—of passing, shades, traces, death—presents itself. Small Offerings feels in many ways like the afterlife of what came before, and as such it cannily points toward the ritual human need to make the absent appear present by means of ceremony, memorial, image, repetition, evocation of traces and the fetishization of physical remains.
What is offered? A response to the empty promises of endless growth and limitless happiness reflected in the layered depths and high-gloss surfaces of Double Happiness and Child Palace? If so, what is the nature of that response? Does this work, in a sense, then, reenact Double Happiness and Child Palace, whose figures now haunt a suddenly evacuated and poisoned space? Have they passed out of the world of commerce-driven phantasmagoria and facile utopian promises—the world of markets, capital, speculation? Is that world now replaced with memento mori signaling the certainty of failure in all human endeavors beyond the existential fact of being human?
Or perhaps the title Small Offerings is a response to earlier engagements with popular idealized notions of “everyday life”—the “double happiness” of marriage, figurative or literal; the promise of “better living through chemistry”; the rough equation of the womb and birth with socialization into a polluted, damaged and damaging world of brute commerce).
Regardless, it’s art that ultimately questions then questions again, that offers us new perceptive pathways but insists we make our own connections, that haunts the grounds of its own origin, unsettling the conscience and inhabiting the imagination, and finally that makes the promise, small as it may be, that such offerings of the imagination may yet help us turn ourselves toward a better, truer world.