Gratitude for this exhibition goes to the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Board, Executive Director, Ursula Morgan, Exhibitions Director, Jen Dragon, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Exhibitions Committee, HollisTaggart representing Hayoon Jay Lee, Photographer John Kleinhans, artists Hayoon Jay Lee, Doug Navarra, Xuewu Zheng, and curator Emilie Houssart.
Original graphic design concept: Susanna Ronner Design Studio
Ordinary Alchemy | Hayoon Jay Lee, Doug Navarra & Xuewu Zheng curated by Emilie Houssart at the Kleinert/James Center for theArts, Woodstock NY
Photo: @xuewu_zheng
The three artists in this exhibit present works based in the processing of mundane daily ephemera: printed papers, grains of rice, leftover bones; old documents and tools. With extraordinary care and labor, these utilitarian materials are transmuted into new forms, inviting us to consider relationships between the materials of cultural structures and individual human lives.Together, these potent works illuminate vast cultural webs spanning past and present – in which we may also place ourselves – as each artist explores history and time in discrete ways.
Hayoon Jay Lee‘s assemblages weave together thriving and inequity in daily life around the globe – encompassing over ten millennia of rice cultivation in EastAsia, and five centuries in theAmericas. Individually, each grain invokes a unique potential and desire. Exquisitely reconfigured in mass, Lee’s works call us to be present with opposing forces in tension: abundance and need, striving and fulfilment, connected in the fragility and power of basic daily nourishment.
Doug Navarra cultivates relationships with found historical documents and objects connected with daily working lives of the past. Engaging with the formal qualities of these antiques, and exploring deeper into traces of individual human characteristics and physical wear, Navarra’s responses honor these unique, everyday artefacts and their associated workerssimultaneously decommissioning the objects with new layers that illuminate the distance between a past world and our own.
Through deep and ongoing meditative labor, Xuewu Zheng works everyday found objects into forms embedded with vast quantities of social data. Zheng has spent decades exploring printed characters on paper as containers of ephemeral cultural matter of all levels. His source materials, which include international newspapers, religious texts and fast food receipts, are reformed through small, repetitive actions into massive post-legible archives that recall burial mounds as well as trash piles; ancient scrolls as well as food mats.
— Emilie Houssart, Curator
Hayoon Jay Lee, Fortitude of Being (detail), 2024
Hayoon Jay Lee, Fortitude of Being, 2024
Hayoon Jay Lee, Speak Nearby (above, center), 2024, Fortitude of Being (below, center), 2024, at the Kleinert/James Center for theArts, Woodstock, NY. Photo: John Kleinhans
Hayoon Jay Lee, Unfamiliar Place - Soaring, 2023
Hayoon Jay Lee, Echo IV, 2023
Hayoon Jay Lee, Eternal Mother - Watching, 2023-2024
DOUG NAVARRA
Doug Navarra, Untitled, 1999
Doug Navarra, Untitled, 2007
Doug Navarra, Untitled, 2007
Doug Navarra, Earbuck, 2018
Doug Navarra, Wrench Rest, 2023 (opposite), Wrenchbot, 2023(above)
Xuewu Zheng, Zen State, 2004 - ongoing (upper right), CenturyText, (front left) 2005 - ongoing
Photo: John Kleinhans, 2024
Xuewu Zheng, Century Text (front), Zen State (center stairs) installation at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 2024
Ordinary Alchemy installation
Photos by John Kleinhans
Hayoon Jay Lee (left) with curator Emilie Houssart (right) at the end of performance Speak Nearby
Photo: @xuewu_zheng
EH: When did rice become activated as a potent material in your artistic practice?
HJL: Something that I can never forget are the food shortages that plagued South Korea in the 1960s and 70s. Rice, of course, was (and still is) the staple food source for Koreans. I recall that my mother always set aside some rice for people in need. Through my mother’s compassionate example, my siblings and I learned how to share and to appreciate the interconnectedness between individuals and the larger community. Because of my upbringing, I am loath to waste any food; however, I had never considered using rice as art material.
In 2005, after meeting with a group of artists over dinner, I used some leftover rice to make a small object, then left it in my studio for several months. One day I noticed the piece and suddenly realized that this material was a part of my artistic identity all along. Like most artists, I have explored diverse art materials to convey my ideas. However, when I work with rice it gives me great pleasure and generates artistically meaningful results. Over the years, I have used rice to create freestanding and relief sculptures, installations, paintings, and performances. Rice is eminently variable, taking different forms, colors, and textures, whether raw or cooked.As I discovered its resilient nature and fragility, I began to see it as more than a simple staple food. Rice plays an essential and outsized role in life and death, in communal settings, as well as in reference to currency, charity, political power and much more.
EH:Your wall pieces contain multitudes: individual grains of rice which also form groups of figures, creating organic, flowing masses within strictly defined edges.Then there are counterbalancing color elements.The paintings I’ve seen of yours depicted rice, spoons and individual figures within masses, within color fields. Can you tell us about the journey into this recent work?
HJL: For me, each effort at artmaking is a journey into the unknown. It excites me and makes me feel uneasy at the same time. It pushes me to struggle and gives great satisfaction. I am inspired to make new work again and again. I still paint on canvas and on paper.At the same time, I have been eagerly exploring the dynamics around individual grains of rice.This material has a particular energy that allows me to shed egotistical desires and just be.This body of work is the most recent part of my practice.
EH:The intensive labor and care in your works seems strongly connected to the physicality of each grain, in line with this more expansive way of being.You write that your work aims to create deeper cross-cultural understanding and promote healing. Can you speak about your floor installation – a huge spiraling form with an energetic center made from bones – in this context?
HJL: I am drawn to natural materials, particularly ones that have a connection to the human body and exude a kind of energy. This installation contains thousands of small, hand-crafted bowls made from cooked rice.The animal bones were collected over the years by family and friends. Making the sculptures and collecting bones is a part of the art making and meditation process. It’s not work - it’s about moments of connection with the world that result in moving life experiences. Often, my works depict biomorphic forms that resemble internal organs, take on nature-like formations, or resonate with dynamic energy and visceral feelings.The crux of the installation emanates from the bones, representing the very core of the body.
EH: Please tell us about the performance at the opening of Ordinary Alchemy.Your action invited an embodied understanding of global food imbalance and exchange, while you danced and connected wordlessly with a room full of strangers.
HJL:This performance, Speak Nearby, is an attempt to intermingle physical and emotional space and to challenge audience members to feel, think, observe, experience, and question what is unspoken.The performance contains four elements: cultural interaction, acknowledging food insecurity, embracing the unknown, and sacrifice and celebration. I try to convey the beauty and enduring strength of life as well as highlighting the issue of food insecurity.And of course, it is a way to celebrate togetherness in a time that has seen so much strife.As a KoreanAmerican artist, it is important for me to collaborate with others, to take that often difficult step of encountering difference, which is a way of opening a passage so that we can begin a dialogue. It is up to the audience to feel – I am only here to introduce a scenario with the potential to generate cathartic emotions.
Left to right: Hayoon Jay Lee, Doug Navarra & Xuewu Zheng
EH: Can you talk a little about how this interaction with old documents and tools began? I’m curious whether it was the marks of time, the expired formats, or the traces of humans on utilitarian objects that intrigued you, or something elseand how these antique objects came to form such an important part of your practice?
DN:The Marking Time drawing series is over 20 years old, so there has been a number of influences within different subsets. I’m working with a piece of forgotten 100-plus-year-old history, a remnant of someone’s past life. I was attracted to using old documents mostly because they contained a history of circumstance through stains, tears, seals, and gestural writing style. In fact, I inherit this “pre-ordained” composition of the document as something to react to. I think of drawing on them as a metaphor for how we deal with our collective history – whether we choose to ignore, change, embellish, or edit as a response to a previously recorded legacy.
EH: I’d love to know more about the geometry in these recent works. Is that a compositional device for you, an instinctive response, something else?
DN: I grew up in the City of NewYork and my conception of nature, trees, forests and organic growth really wasn’t familiar. Nature to me was playing on a rectangular piece of concrete sidewalk, with angular building structures all around me. I think it was just the way in which I saw the world.
EH:Ten of your drawings on historic documents are exhibited in Ordinary Alchemy.Tell us a little about the works you’re most excited about. For example, I’m intrigued by how you select documents, what is covered up, and what they have become now.
DN:After many years working with found documents, I found I was becoming sensitive to the feelings I got from the person who created the invoice, or the letter, or the arithmetic notebook. In many ways, I felt as if the person still had a heartbeat, and that their personality was very much alive and on view to me. I didn’t want to ruin that feeling by covering up the source. I really wanted to enhance it and lend to it the respect that it deserves. If you read the letter/drawing Earbuck, it displays this characterization.
EH:You described your ceramic sculptures - your newest work - as “wrench rests”. Can you talk about the process and impetus behind the stacked forms you are building?There is something industrial about them, with their grainy texture and block structures; and yet the slight warp from the kiln, plus the softness from the glaze drips and translucent corners seems to build some relationship with the tools - especially the handles. Plus they are not functional. What are you exploring here, and what are you discovering along the way?
DN:These new ceramic sculptures will continue to invoke a figural perspective, like the Wrenchbot piece in the show. The geometry makes it look somewhat robotic as a standing figure. I like that a lot and will continue to explore this aspect along with incorporating different antique found objects. I’m also firing stoneware in a new large propane kiln that reaches 2300℉, so there is a new high-fire glaze vocabulary. I often fire these pieces two or three times trying to attain an even glaze application, one that also feels more like a rich old patina.This opens up a whole new platform for me and I sense it is just the beginning.
Xuewu Zheng (right) with Emilie Houssart (left)
EH:You have talked about your work as inseparable from your daily meditation practice. It is also inseparable from the printed ephemera of daily life, looking at the materials you collect and transform. Do you see these works partially as an archive, a record of the culture around you?
XZ:Yes, I agree with that. In the past twenty years, my meditation series installation works, originating with newspaper, and later religious books, have been created using documents and materials that record the culture, history, social events and religious teachings of the world. I re-presented these documents in an artistic way and preserved them permanently.
At the same time, these works are traces of my meditation process. I’m not the kind of artist who begins by thinking about making art. In my daily life, I often sit quietly in the studio and meditate. Maybe I should be considered a modern Zen monk first and then a contemporary artist. When I meditate, I don’t count beads in my hands like the monks do; my hands are busy with materials like newspapers, books, wood, metal, cotton, etc. In this way, day after day, year after year, the more I accumulate, the more they will naturally become my installation works. In fact, these are first the products of my meditation process, and then they become my works.
EH: Please tell us about the forms you choose for the reassembled materials - the scrolls and piles. What do those mean for you?
XZ:The installation in this show is in two parts.The first is the work made of newspaper twists [Zen State], formed into a pile. InAsian culture, this form signifies a tomb, implying that old life ends here and new life is born here.The second part is made from newspaper scrolls from my work Century Text. Here, the opened scroll works are laid out layer by layer and placed together. It is as if the history books have been read to the end and we know the past – but we don’t know what the future of humanity will be.
EH:The works in this show are just a small fraction of larger installations. How large are these works, and have they ever been shown at their full scale?
XZ:Yes, the number of works in this exhibition is just a very small part – perhaps 5% of the total. I have exhibited Century Text in its complete form twice at the NationalArt Museum of China, which required a very large space.
EH:Your work travels around, interacting with different cultural sites. For example, I have seen documentation of your scrolls in dialogue with military monuments, international museums and religious sites. Is there a place where you have felt your work is most potent? What are you learning about the work as it moves?
XZ:The places I choose to implement my projects are all places with special significance to culture and history. I don’t really think about which locations will be more potent than others.As my work moves, I feel more and more that it is meaningful for artists to pay attention to issues of human development and evolution.
Hayoon Jay Lee performing Speak Nearby at the Kleinert/James Center for theArts
Hayoon Jay Lee performing Speak Nearby at the Kleinert/James Center for theArts on January 20, 2024
filmed and edited by R. F. Richardson / Bastille Day Films
Xuewu Zheng, Zen State, Installation at the Kleinert/James Center for theArts
Artist Biographies
Born in Daegu, South Korea, Hayoon Jay Lee obtained a BFAin sculpture from the Maryland Institute College ofArt (MICA) in 2007 and an MFAfrom the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICAin 2009. Lee's awards include a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship award (2008) from the U.S. Department of Education, a Full FellowshipArtist in ResidencyAward (2012) from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a best in show distinction award (2008) at the 14th International Exhibition, SoHo 20 Gallery, Chelsea, NewYork City, and a Dapu InternationalArtAward (2011) from the NorthernArt Museum, Daqing, China.
Previous artist residencies include 99 Museum (Beijing, China: 2014), Gwangju Museum ofArt (S. Korea: 2012), the FineArts Work Center (Provincetown, MA: 2009), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson VT: 2009), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY: 2011),Art Farm (Marquette, NE: 2016), Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence Program (Woodstock, NY: 2012), and the Beijing Studio Center (2010) in Beijing, China. She currently lives and works in NewYork City. www.hayoonjaylee.net
Doug Navarra lives in St. Remy in the Hudson Valley region of Upstate NewYork. He has a BFAfrom Tyler School ofArt atTemple University and an MFAfrom the University of Minnesota. He has received three fellowships from the NewYork Foundation for theArts (NYFA), three grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, theAdolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for study in Venice, Italy. Doug Navarra’s work is in many collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the LosAngeles County Museum and the Museum ofArts and Design, NewYork, NY. www.dougnavarra.com
Xuewu Zheng was born in Heilongjiang Province, China. He received a BFAfrom Harbin Normal University in China, and two MFAs from SUNYNew Paltz in the United States. He lives in NewYork. Zheng’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughoutAsia, Europe,Australia and the United States. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harbin Normal University, China;Appalachian State University; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Columbia University; Vassar College; and University College Cork, Ireland. His artist residencies include Vermont Studio Center; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; GwangjuArt Museum, Korea; Jingdezhen Sanbao International Center, China; and NebraskaArt Farm.
Zheng’s work is held in numerous international collections, including the NationalArt Museum of China; Kaethe Kollwitz-Museum-Berlin, Germany; theAustralian Embassy, China; Woo Jae-GilArt Museum, Korea;AcklandArt Museum, Guilford College,TheTurchin Center for VisualArts, United States; and GwangjuArt Museum, Korea. www.zhengxuewuart.com
