/whenafter_catalog_issuu

JAN UARY 13 – FE B RUARY 1 2 , 2 0 1 1 / C U R AT ED BY A NC HO R GRA P H I C S

When After Comes Before: Phillip Chen & Tomas Vu

January 13 – February 12, 2011

Phillip Chen Five Hands relief etching 31 X 23 inches

Phillip Chen Shooting the Devil (After Abu'l Hasan) relief etching 46 X 31 inches

Phillip Chen Men of Action relief etching 31 X 46 inches

Approaching C

BY JA M ES I A NNAC C O NE

In an essay titled “Picturing States of Affairs: The Art of Phillip Chen” written for an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing, art and cultural historian Lenore Metrick-Chen references the concept of yi wu as put forth by Wu Hung. Wu Hung describes yi wu:

“Any object that points to the past is an yi wu because it is a surviving portion of a vanished whole; by arrangement or accident, it has been severed from its original context to become part of contemporary culture. An yi wu is thus characterized both by pastness and contemporaneity: it originated in the past, but it belongs to the here and now.”

According to Wu Hung any artifact of the past has to exist in the present. This is easily seen in the example of a visitor to a natural history museum who when looking at the stone tools of ancient man can not help but view them with the knowledge of their modern day equivalents lining the shelves at the Home Depot. But the art of Phillip Chen and Tomas Vu shows that this idea is not confined to ancient relics. It is not a one-way street from past to present but a two-way highway that extends from the present to both the past and the future. Their prints collapse time creating an incongruous space where linear knowledge is replaced by a state of simultaneity. Drawing from personal experience, written history, and the imagination their work incorporates long departed traditions, objects and landscapes, along with futuristic totems, positioning all firmly within a contemporary context. The push and pull of yesterday, today, and tomorrow is encompassed in the very materiality of the work, constructed using computer-controlled laser cutters combined with old-school hand printmaking. Their work is a documentation and schematic diagram of the past, present and future. As such their work often takes on a cosmological appearance.

Phillip Chen Sargasso SeaSuperfluous Things relief etching 62 X 23 inches

This cosmic connection is intrinsic to the work. Its look and feel reminds the viewer of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the far reaches of space, images made from light emitted by its sources thousands of years ago. In most cases of human experience, light can be thought of as moving instantaneously, but over long distances the finite speed of light becomes very apparent. Ole Rømer demonstrated that light travelled at a finite speed by observing the periods of Jupiter's moon Io to be shorter when the Earth was approaching the planet than when moving away from it. Meaning the light reflected off this distant moon was arriving sooner with the less distance it had to traverse. The light we see from Io at its closest point takes about 21 seconds to reach us, but for the great distances from interstellar objects light’s journey can last for hundreds of thousands of years. The light from these objects brings them into our present as they once were. What we see is not how the objects exist in the conventional sense of “now,” but how they existed at the time the light was emitted. After thousands of years of travelling, light reaches the camera in our orbiting telescope which then transmits images to be viewed by our eyes, bringing a celestial object’s “then” into existence in our “now”.

James Iannaccone graduated from Northwestern University with a BA in Art History followed by positions with the Terra Museum of American Art and the Judy A Saslow Gallery. He is currently Assistant to the Director of Anchor Graphics at Columbia College Chicago.

Yet our standard conception of then and now can be pulled apart even further by Albert Einstein’s paper “On the Electro Dynamics of Moving Bodies”. In it he lays out his special theory of relativity, which has acutely altered our understanding of time. Just as we perceive the speed of light as instantaneous for practical purposes, classical mechanics works well in the common realm of everyday experience.

Special relativity explains how these laws do not hold up when the velocities involved approach the speed of light. In such a circumstance special relativity has shown that two events, simultaneous for one observer, may not be simultaneous for another, and that the duration of the time between two events is not equal for all observers. Time is no longer uniform and absolute, but dependent on velocity.

Special relativity is formulated from the principle that all motion is relative, and that there is no absolute state of rest. Everything is always moving with respect to something else. The theory centers on separate frames of reference moving in relation to one another. In these frames space and time are combined into a single continuum of spacetime where an event can be assigned a single unique time and location. Space-time is usually interpreted using our conventional understanding of three-dimensional space but with the addition of time as a fourth dimension. We can specify an event by its four space-time coordinates using the time of occurrence and its three-dimensional spatial location to place it at a point in space-time. According to special relativity this point will be in different locations for observers in different frames of reference moving with respect to each other.

Suppose we have three reference frames, whose spatial alignment and clocks coincide, but are moving at a constant velocity close to the speed of light in separate directions. For a viewer positioned in the first frame, events A and B occur simultaneously, but for a viewer in the second frame it is possible to observe A preceding B and in the third frame to see B preceding A, depending on the motion of these frames with regard to the first.

The observed timing of these events also relates to the measured distance between them. As the time separation between the occurrence of events changes, the distance in space between them also changes. The relation between the change in time and the change in space, known as the space-time interval, however will be the same for all three observers. This is not due to imperfections in semantics or measurement. The underlying reality of the events remains the same for all three observers, only their perspective of them changes. Similarly left and right are different for two individuals who are facing each other. If an object is positioned next to them, for one individual it will be on the right hand side. For the other it is on the left hand side. But in both cases the object is still in the same place.

Thus it becomes possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to travel for great distances and over great lengths of time while aging very little. As a rocket ship approaches the speed of light the rate of passage of time on-board slows down.

The ship's clock and any human travelling with it will show less elapsed time than a clock left behind on Earth. With sufficiently high speeds, space travelers could return thousands of years in the future. However, any such application for interstellar travel would require advanced and as of yet undeveloped methods of propulsion. Nonetheless, scenarios such as this have been fuel for science fiction stories the world over including the classic film Planet of the Apes.

Upon reentry into the gallery, one can make a comparison between special relativity and the work of Phillip Chen and Tomas Vu. It’s as if the artists have condensed all of the possible frames of reference described by relativity into a single frame. Events do not appear to happen in any discernable order. A before B, B before A, A and B at the same time, all occur within a single picture. The past and future come together in the present. Furthering the analogy to special relativity, their images similarly collapse space. Multiple scenes and objects get layered upon each other, as if a TV were receiving signals for multiple channels at once. Wide expanses of landscape, maps and charts, pieces of rocket engines and satellites, hand held objects, along with microbes and molecules are all represented at the same scale.

Their works are visual interpretations of the complex mathematical equations that constitute Einstein’s theory, including its greatest claim to fame, the equation E = mc2.

Showing the equivalence of energy and mass, E = mc2 has helped usher in the nuclear age. By looking at the masses of atoms, one can determine which nuclei have stored energy that can be released through nuclear reactions. This has led to the development of nuclear power and the atomic bomb. The implications of this formula have made it one of the most legendary equations ever conceived while giving rise to the specter of a nuclear apocalypse that may one day have Charlton Heston pounding the sandy surf shouting to the heavens “You maniacs! You blew it up!” With E = mc2, destruction and creation run hand in hand. Likewise, Tomas Vu and Phillip Chen pull apart and reconstruct through images that at once resemble a world ravaged by war and the instruction manual for its reassembly. They are following in the footsteps of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, not only displaying the mutability of time and space, but the collapse and rebirth of the physical world we inhabit along with the status quo of our daily experience.

COVER:

Phillip Chen Sargasso Sea-Superfluous Things (detail) relief etching 62 X 23 inches Tomas Vu Flatland series (detail) silkscreen, laser engraved paper and wood veneer with hand coloring on paper 35 x 46.5 inches

Tomas Vu Flatland Series (detail) silkscreen, laser engraved paper and wood veneer with hand coloring on paper four panels each 35 x 47 inches

Tomas Vu Flatland Series (detail) silkscreen, laser engraved paper and wood veneer with hand coloring on paper four panels each 35 x 47 inches

Tomas Vu Flatland series (detail) silkscreen, laser engraved paper and wood veneer with hand coloring on paper four panels each 35 x 47 inches

A+D art

+design

AVERILL AND BERNARD LEVITON A+D GALLERY 619 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605 312 369 8687 COLUM.EDU/ADGALLERY

GALLERY HOURS TUESDAY – SATURDAY 11AM – 5PM THURSDAY 11AM – 8PM

This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design Department and The School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago.

ANCHOR GRAPHICS A PROGRAM OF THE ART + DESIGN DEPARTMENT AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO