Mirror Spit Luxurious Flowerbuds
The voluptuaries of Walasse Ting, sudden tragedy vs slow takes, a new golden age of experimental docs & "bee bread"
Hello, the news is bad, and that is hardly news. Let’s dive face-first into some soft neon petals.
I was recently revisiting the work of the artist and poet Walasse Ting (1929-2010), best known for his color-soaked paintings of flowers, birds, fruit, and above all, languorous ladies. Walasse Ting (aka Ding Xiongquan aka 丁雄泉) led a fascinating, globe-trotting life, born in Wuxi near Shanghai and nicknamed “Hua La Si” (“spoiled”) by his family, which he would later stylize as “Walasse” as a nod to his idol Matisse. Growing up and first studying art in the turbulence of wartime Shanghai, he decamped to Hong Kong in 1946 and onwards to Paris in 1953; he reportedly arrived in France with a cardboard suitcase, a roll of rice paper wrapped in a red cloth, five US dollars in his pocket, and not a word of French. But soon he reinvented himself as the quintessential bohemian exile, living in a garret, falling in with the artists of the CoBrA group, and combining Chinese calligraphy and ink painting techniques with abstract expressionism in his evolving personal style. After moving to New York in 1959, he became friends with Sam Francis and others, and along with painting, began publishing his brash, surreal poetry, like in the fetchingly-named “My Shit and Love: 10 Poems” (1961), and the epic “One Cent Life” (1964) which was illustrated by loose-leaf lithographs by his pals like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Indiana. Starting in the 70s, he leaned into vivid figuration he would explore for the rest of his life, these infinite gardens of flora, fauna, and les femmes. Ting’s women are always sensual, sometimes outright erotic, embedded in the complex history of the male painterly gaze and its muses, but also imbued with a relaxed and playful vitality on their own terms.
In Ting’s “One Cent Life”, one of his riotous poems contains the phrase: “MIRROR SPIT LUXURIOUS FLOWERBUDS”, which as either an imperative or a description could apply to his canvases: a mirror of the dreamed-of world that could reflectively spit luxurious flowerbuds back at us. Compared to the screens that are continuously spitting horror, this command, which sounds almost like an oracular Google search string, is something to aim for instead. The flowerbuds will not eradicate horror, but we need to conjure them all the same.
You can read a bit more about Ting’s long and storied life here but sadly there is no full-length memoir or biography yet (I hope someone is working on this? It would also make a fabulous movie, btw).
Sudden Tragedy vs Slow Takes
There has been a lot of strong writing and reflection on the devastating murders in Atlanta and anti-Asian racism more generally. As with so many sudden tragedies (which are less “sudden” when seen as tied to the big picture of systemic violence and inequality in this country), I particularly value the collective, conversational, and “slow take” responses (and actual one-on-one conversations with friends above all). We need the news, but after an eruption of shattering violence, it often feels like the pace and structure of social media is deeply at odds with the human ability to process, absorb, understand, grieve, etc. I thought this piece on “the impossibility of silence” online summarized some of these paradoxes really well. I wish our ecosystem had more room, incentive, and resources for slow takes, long takes, cold takes, multivocal takes, and in the meantime, I will keep looking to some outlets like the below who do such consistently thoughtful work.
- “Covering Anti-Asian Hate" - a roundup by invaluable newsletter Chinese Storytellers which collected responses by Asian and Asian-American journalists; this quote from Wilfred Chan particularly struck me:
It’s also surreal to experience this as a journalist. Some people I’ve spoken to since the Atlanta attacks assumed I must be working on a piece about it, but I’ve been grieving while turning down editors’ requests. The current discourse is already at a fever pitch — I don’t think the world needs another “hot take” on Actually, The Killings Were Caused by [X].
- “Interpreting the Atlanta Massacre” - a moving group discussion from the excellent podcast Time to Say Goodbye examining the interweaving of gender, nationality, and class in the Atlanta attack and its media reception, and their earlier conversation with an organizer from Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian & migrant sex workers who organize transnationally. Further list of great orgs to support here.
A Fundraiser Worth Your Time
Just want to give a shout-out to this fundraiser organized by friends, artists, and curators I admire, hosted by Make Room Los Angeles and full of treasures by Yanyan Huang, Peng Ke, Pixy Liao and others.
“We Stand Together to Stop AAPI Hate: A Fundraising Exhibition”: March 26-April 23, 2021
We Stand Together to Stop AAPI Hate is a special exhibition brings together dozens of works committed by over 40 of the foremost diverse artists across generations, from both within and outside of the gallery’s program. Participating artists includes Judy Chicago, Kat Lyons, Pixy Liao, Dominique Fung, Susan Chen and Eddie Martinez, among many others. The works will be sold to benefit the AAPI Community Fund and Stop AAPI Hate Organization to enable tracking and efficient response to the surge in racism and xenophobia.
Watching ~ A New Golden Age for Experimental Docs?
There are a lot of incredible virtual screenings/film events going on right now, particularly of experimental documentaries; I’ve rounded up several below. It may just be the fact all festivals/cinematheques from around the world are currently online, but it also feels like there is a groundswell of new, exciting energy in experimental/hybrid docs and shorts. Perhaps it’s due to a new generation who has come of age with super-low-budget smartphone video, and YouTube/torrents as both film school and distribution platform (see also rise of the “desktop doc” as a key subgenre). I also wonder if it’s a side effect of the “Netflixication” of the professional documentary class - eg, more mainstream/narrative doc makers have had more opportunities to ply their trade on more establishment platforms, leaving more room in festivals/grant-making organizations/etc for the truly DIY, personal, weird projects. Whatever the case, it’s inspiring to see, and I hope more of these films reach a wider audience and that the makers eventually get Netflix-level resources without the compromises (we can dream, right?)
On *April 1* ¡TODAY!, Thursday 7pm EDT: “And Besides, It’s True” with Paige K. B. & Tiffany Sia, an evening of screenings and discussion devoted to disinformation and rumor, presented by Triple Canopy /Spectacle Theatre. The artists “will each give presentations of found footage and media clips, tracing the distribution of psy-ops, censored messages, and subversive appeals through such varied networks as Twitter Live and The David Letterman Show. K. B. will consider the comedic angle of American manifestations of LARPing as reality, from Andy Kaufman to QAnon; Sia will examine the Rashomoning of Hong Kong protest footage and its legal implications.” (If you have not yet seen Sia’s modern masterpiece "NEVER REST/UNREST”, you have another chance via Prismatic Ground, listed below!)
Until April 3: “Terre Femme” (2017-2021, dir. Courtney Stephens) as part of MoMa’s Doc Fortnight. I caught “Terre Femme” last year as a livestreamed performance and it’s a painstakingly researched archival dive into Western women’s amateur travel films/home movies from the 1920s-40s. I loved this quote from Courtney about the tensions of the project:
“There is an idea when you’re scavenging around in archives that you're doing the work of feminist retrieval, and you’re going to be able to stumble into other peoples lives and experiences in ways that resolve your own, or offer a gift to the present. And there's something really attractive about that. But what is found is usually more fraught, thorny, and full of the ‘bad old days,’ as Rick Prelinger calls it. But one still has to contend with the beauty in the films while applying a critical apparatus.”
Until April 4: “Dream Delivery” (2018, dir. Zheng Yuan), a hypnotic riff on the infrastructure of overworked human delivery couriers that powers China today. It’s the last installment of “Crashing Into the Future”, a program of artists’ films curated by Cao Fei for e-flux.
April 8-18: the lineup for brand-new experimental documentary festival Prismatic Ground is a jaw-dropper. (Tiffany Sia’s “NEVER REST/UNREST” appears in the awesomely-titled program “Kill the Colonizer in Your Head”)
Until July 15: “Cousins and Kin” series for San Francisco Cinematheque, curated by Cousin Collective (formed by Adam Piron, Alex Lazarowich, Sky Hopinka and Adam Khalil) which supports Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. Very excited to dig into this monthly; catch the first cycle until April 15 here.
Anytime: “The Anguish of the Feline Webcam Filter” - my friend Kristina Budelis co-directed this short doc for the New Yorker investigating the “Lawyer Cat” video that went viral a few months back - revealing that the original cat in the filter in question is from Taiwan among other delightful details.
Reading
“Fermentation as Care” - did you know that bees make “bread”?! One of the gems of this piece on the relationship between fermented “cultures” and human “culture” and the intermingling of people, microbes, and food processes from the brand-new issue #5 of LinYee Yuan’s ever-prescient MOLD MAGAZINE on the future of food. Order the gorgeous print issue HERE.
“The World’s First Programmable Organism” - Claire Evans explores the programmable organisms known as Xenobots and their mind-bending implications: “Cognition, then, isn’t a binary; it’s a long continuum that reaches back into evolutionary history…”
“What AI Can Teach Us About the Myth of Human Genius” - Elvia Wilk probes this question through the new book “Pharmako-AI” written by K. Allado-McDowell in collaboration with GPT-3. Touching on similar points as both pieces above: “Although we don’t typically think about work in these terms, it is not a stretch to say that humans collaborate daily, if unconsciously, with nonhumans, both organic and machinic.”
“You’re living inside other people’s dreams; and these are not good dreams.” Dean Kissick’s latest column in Spike Art on the largely dismal aesthetics of the current surge of cryptoart (which are not the least of it’s problems… but certainly one of them. Much. More. To. Be. Said. On. This.)
Dirt: Daisy Alioto on Elsa Peretti & YouTube Faces: “I like that her hearts are asymmetrical. A human heart is asymmetrical because one side has to work harder than the other one, which I think is an apt metaphor for the ebbs and flows of relationships.”
Chelsea Hodson interviews Jo Ann Beard about grappling with aging, how a writer’s process changes over time (Beard’s did! which gives me profound hope!), & the radical act of just sitting and thinking:
JB: There are a million different permutations that take you from childhood on through middle age, but when you get past middle age it all changes. You’re not living for the future anymore because you’re in it, you arrived, the car has stopped and it’s time to get out and stretch your legs, take a look into that deep chasm you drove so far to see.”
“This Piece of Land, These Bits of Sea” - A worthwhile long essay by Robin Peckham on how Taiwanese artists are developing a new geo-ontology of their, well, “piece of land”:
Increasingly, the language that describes Taiwan is drawn from this definition: the phrase “this piece of land” seems, anecdotally, to be slowly replacing the more standard references to political jurisdictions, specific cultural backgrounds, and shared immediate histories. It is a phrase that recognizes a complex reality, including the arrival of successive waves of colonizing and occupying powers, settler societies, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In extending this claim to geoontology, contemporary Taiwan subsumes Aboriginal historical time in a way that could be seen as either inclusiveness or appropriation, and no doubt contains elements of both.
Listening
Field recordings from Bishan village, Anhui Province, by the Chinese artist/curator/multihyphenate Ou Ning. I especially like the tracks “Lovely Lambs” and “Reminder from the Robotic Forest Policeman”. His new book “Utopia in Practice” about long-term projects revitalizing rural spaces in Bishan and beyond is great; this interview with curator Hu Fang is also a good intro to his work. Ou Ning’s Instagram is one I have been living through vicariously all year of lockdown and these recordings are especially transportive. Cottagecore drools / villagecore rules.
Gifting
I am always stumbling across *cool things* that could be nice gifts for yourself or others, especially from indie artists or that benefit good causes. I am going to start collecting them here.
I love this “Who the f*&% is Ralph?” tee/tote (22 USD) from SÜPRMARKT, the project bringing affordable organic food to South Central LA. This fundraising design is inspired by the closure of Ralphs market because its parent company did not want to pay its employees hazard pay (ugh). Proceeds benefit families in Crenshaw/Slauson area directly.
Wishing you jewel-toned parrots, cats and peonies,
x shc