Vessels & Banner s from the Scanning China Project
20 0 6 -20 0 9 by S e a n J u s t i c e
Vessel: Ceramic 948 (2008) 2
The Scanning China Project: Learning to Live and Work in China
In 2005 I began working extensively in Beijing & Shanghai, teaching photography, exploring Chinese pictorial culture, and reconnecting with my memories of growing up in Asia. This project is an exploration of how it felt to be there, an emotional history of my work in China, and a meditation on what happens when cultural currents come together. Vessels & Banners is an exhibit of pigmented ink prints on cotton rag paper. The exhibit is available for installation. Pictures are available as fine-prints and licensed imagery. Swimming at the Center of the World is a visual-essay exploring the experience of working in China, combining photographs, photo-montage, and text in the form of poetry, aphoristic observations, and expository essays. A book dummy is available; sample page-spreads are available on seanjustice.com. Connections is a web-based resource guide for Western artists who want to explore projects in China—in progress at http://scanningchinaproject.com/connections.
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T h e Ve s s e l s 2006 - 2009
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Vessel: Ceramic 22 (2008) 5
Vessel: Ceramic 60 (2007) 6
Vessel: Ceramic 13 (2009) 7
Vessel: Ceramic 16 (2009) 8
Vessel: Ceramic 71 (2008) 9
Vessel: Ceramic 43 (2008) 10
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Vessel: Ceramic 21 (2009) 11
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Vessel: Ceramic 25 (2007) 12
Vessel: Ceramic 30 (2007) 13
Vessel: Ceramic 24 (2007) 14
Vessel: Ceramic 19 (2007) 15
T h e Exhibition at the Wagner Galle r y, N e w Yo r k U n i v e r s i t y, S p r i n g 2 0 0 8 C urated by Ann Chwatsky
by Frank Crescion i - S a n t o n i & Ly n n e T h o m p s o n , Associate Curator s
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pril is Asian Heritage Month at New York University, and the Wagner School is proud to conjointly feature, in our gallery space, a captivating collection of photographic prints inspired by one of the continent’s most prominent and influential cultures. With Scanning China: Vessels & Banners, photographer and graphic artist Sean Justice presents, for the first time to the public, a sampling from his on-going self-exploratory project which closely delves into his experiences while working and living in China. Compelled by a two-fold desire to reconnect with his early upbringing in Asia while also surveying the country’s burgeoning art scene, Sean Justice embarked on a series of professional and personal ventures that took him to Beijing and Shanghai between 2005 and 2007. During this two-year stretch, Chinese culture remained surprisingly hidden to the artist—a mysterious space where daily life offered a fascinating array of expected and unexpected interactions. This constant state of surprise—at once perplexing and alluring—led Justice to examine his own process of cultural assimilation as well as to ponder the mechanisms by which one recognizes and experiences culture in general. As such, a profound sense of unknowing influences the photographs and composite prints of Scanning China, where familiar objects and vessels (bamboo sticks, rice bowls, tea cups and flower vases) purchased in local flea markets are distorted and re-contextualized in ways that render them as pictorial unknowns. Viewers can grasp the patterns and forms of the objects, but not see the objects themselves— an experience that heightens the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar and which echoes the artist’s own cultural journey. The visual element that most decisively anchors Justice’s
photographic explorations is traditional pottery patterns, as prominently illustrated in the Vessels. Upon his arrival in China, Justice was immediately attracted to the richness and multiplicity of the patterns he came across on a variety of surfaces, such as ceramic objects and pottery or even commercial materials and textiles. Pottery patterns in particular possessed an appealing emblematic power. The highly recognizable designs, cultural fingerprints of Chinese aesthetics, soon became a focus to the artist, as they initially evoked a comforting sense of familiarity. However, as these elaborate patterns elicited further investigation (like so much else that Justice encountered in these cities), they began to reveal themselves as far more complex and challenging than originally anticipated. As common and inexpensive objects, these containers are readily attainable and easily accessible; yet, as portals of an intricate designing tradition, they become far more valuable and perplexing. Justice marveled at this contrast and soon realized that it applied to his experience of life in Beijing and Shanghai— two ostensibly homogeneous populaces, and both underlain with dense and oft-conflicting intersections of characters, subcultures and dialects. For Justice, these ornate vessels act as a metaphor for the way in which he observed and interpreted the cultures that first produced them. The sense of below-the-surface intricacy that Justice discovered in China, and the subsequent communication breakdowns it frequently led to, are aptly suggested by the visual distortions of the objects depicted in his prints. That said, the symbolic significance of these puzzling images is not limited to their final abstract forms, but extends as well to the scanning process employed to produce them. Justice created the Vessels prints by placing the items directly onto a scanning bed and shifting their position on the apparatus as the image was recorded. This idea of capturing objects in
opposite: Banner: Wall (singular), Shanghai (2007) 16
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motion, of experimenting with the unpredictable creation of irreproducible images, alludes to the ever-shifting manner in which Justice himself navigated and dealt with life in China—continually adjusting to the unexpected and in equal measures perplexed and delighted by the outcomes. Like each impression from a moving vessel on the scanner, each random interaction and communication mishap always yielded a unique end result. In this sense, the scanning process becomes an integral part of the artist’s investigation, and for those who learn about it, as
element of motion, he successfully manages to amplify the otherwise limiting boundaries of the scanner in order to achieve a desired effect. In the Banners, on the other hand, the objects remain stationary and their spatial arrangement undisturbed. With these camera pictures, both time and space function in simpler terms and within the expected parameters—the images are captured almost instantaneously, thus allowing framing and composition to become the focal elements. For Justice, these contrasting methods of image production directly
revelatory of his intentions as the final prints themselves.
relate to the different ways one processes and copes with cultural assimilation. Occasionally, these paths are smooth and easily traversed (the camera pictures), and often times they are challenging and difficult to scale (scanned images). The placement of Bamboo One and Wall as the pieces that respectively open and close the exhibit is a conspicuous and thought-provoking choice. Perhaps in their bookend positions, they act as an outer surface to the abstract and far more complex inner layers of the interceding Untitled selections.
The inclusion of two photographs, Bamboo One and Wall, offers a pronounced thematic and stylistic juxtaposition to the scanner-originated pieces. Bamboo One and Wall are relatively straightforward in both form and execution, inspiring a reflective serenity that stands in sharp contrast to the tension and mysterious aura of the pottery prints. If the distorted imagery of the Vessels series has come to symbolize the hidden delights of the unknown and the frustrations of miscommunication, the unmanipulated simplicity of these two photographs could in turn represent those presumably infrequent moments of uncomplicated existence in the artist’s journey through China. Under this interpretational assignment, the operational and technical attributes of the devices utilized to produce these two sets of images can, once again, shed some light onto their metaphoric significance. With both a scanner and a camera, image production relies on the interlinked variables of time and space. However, while a scanner functions by minimizing space to show how objects are arranged in time, a camera works (for the most part) by minimizing time to emphasize how objects are arranged in a threedimensional space. With his pottery images, Justice, in essence, problematizes the scanning process by shifting the objects during capturing. By adding this
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Whether enticed by a stripped-down wall in Shanghai or a pattern-rich ceramic from a Beijing flea market, whether captured by a point-and-shoot camera or by an artfully manipulated scanner, the prints that comprise Scanning China: Vessels & Banners pay a personal tribute to an extraordinary culture and serve as a testament to one of the most exhilarating experiences in Sean Justice’s career. Through the artist’s literal and figurative lens, these objects are no longer mere vessels and containers; instead, they have become expressive and highly personal representations of their source culture.
Banner: White Flowers (3 sections), Shanghai (2007) 19
above: Banner: Open (3 sections), Beijing (2009) 20
next page: Banner: Path (2 sections) Shanghai (2009) 21
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Banner: Bamboo Two (5 sections), Shanghai (2009) 24
Artist Statement : Banners Hanging scrolls imprinted with text are an ancient part of Chinese culture, and we have parallel forms in Western culture as well. These segmented pictures are meant to evoke the process of getting under the surface of something we might think we already know. While the ostensible subject matter of each picture flirts with Western clichés about China, I hope that by breaking the surface into layers and then further separating it into individual hanging slices, a visual assembly process occurs. These aren’t ordinary pictures, and yet they are, really. Simple things and simple moments from my daily life in China—streets, bamboo, flowers, architectural details, fish ponds—we know these things, even in China. But I hope that the form of the banner precipitates a new experience of them. Media: Pigmented ink jet prints on cotton rag paper. Sizes and prices vary. Editions of 4 with 2 AP each.
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Vessel: Ceramic 10-2 (2008) 26
Artist Statement : Vessels The Scanning China Project is a meditation on learning about a culture that is different from one’s own. The Vessel pictures explore a changing metaphor at the heart of our two cultures—the necessity of expressing one’s own individuality in relation to the historical and contingent forms that we have been born into. In the West we are expected to forge our own path at any expense, to reject the forms of our parents, to rebel against the continuities of the past: to do otherwise would be to live an unexamined cliché. In China the attitude is vastly different. The forms of the past must be internalized and then reshaped with intimacy, with respect for the continuity they represent: to do otherwise would be to cut oneself loose from breath itself. At this moment in our intermingled time-lines, both cultures are experimenting with revisions of these deeply held positions. These pictures of flea-market ceramics explore the way that ancient continuities (represented by the prototypical forms of common Chinese ceramics) are being reshaped by modern conversations (represented by the moving image scanner technology used to make the pictures). The conundrum at the center of this work is whether culture is the container of our experience, or if, on the other hand, our individual experience constructs the vessels we use to isolate ourselves from each other. About the Vessels Ceramic vessels have been important to me since my early childhood in South Korea, where I saw ancient celadon excavated from new fields. Later, looking for pottery shards with my father in Arizona, a broken piece of clay emerging from the desert could evoke fantasies of discovery and deep connections with the past. Ceramics, physically embedded within the ground of a specific place, become tokens of trade and currency when removed
from that space, and can travel continents and endure centuries. As both container and decorated surface, ceramic vessels embody the culture of the people who made them, and this physicality and process of transformation—from anonymous clay to artifact and then back to common earth—touches on history, art, science, and the shape of knowledge itself. The ceramics in these pictures—brush holders, rice bowls, teacups—were excavated from weekend flea markets in Beijing and Shanghai. The pictures were made by moving the ceramic across the glass of a flat-bed scanner as the scanning sensor was also moving. The ceramic appears warped because it drifted in and out of sync with the sensor during the scan. As I worked, the glass of the scanner became abraded and smudged by the ceramic surfaces of the vessels, causing the scratches and other texture visible in the pictures. There is no additional “digital” distortion added to the pictures, though in some pictures I’ve added fabric backgrounds which were scanned separately. Media: Pigmented ink jet prints on cotton rag paper. 13 x 18 inches & 24 x 33 inches, each edition of 10 with 2 AP. Price 13 x 18 $1,100; 24 x 33 $2,500. About the interplay of Vessels and Banners: These two series were conceived together and inform each other. At once abstract and yet indexical, I want the flex and push of experience and interpretation to activate in real-time as the viewer absorbs the forms and textures. From picture to picture, and within the pictures, I want to precipitate a dialog about how we know what we think we know. Sean Justice is an artist, writer and educator in New York. He teaches photography and digital art at New York University, the International Center of Photography, and Parsons The New School for Design. He lives on Staten Island. For more on this work please see: http://scanningchinaproject.com/ http://seanjustice.com/
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Vessels & Banners: Learning to live and work in China by Sean Justice, 2006-2009 Exhibition available. Images available for licensing. Contact: sean@seanjustice.com Web: http://seanjustice.com/ Mobile: U.S. 347-232-5471 Vessel: Ceramic 33 (2008)