solo- Funes’ Broken Mirror | 2018

Series: Funes’ Broken Mirror

Exhibition: Funes’ Broken Mirror
Date: April 21 to May 23, 2018
Medium: installation | tree stumps, paint, mirrored finished stainless steel sheets, steel, resin, rubber mold, resin casts, glass, vinyl text, plaster, neodymium magnets, wood, screws, nuts, video, sound, live performance
Dimension: variable
Location: Rubber Factory, New York

Read the full description in Press Release

Funes’ Broken Mirror is a project that explores certain human experiences shared among many of us, such as loss, alienation, separation, trauma, adaption, and change. In this debut at the Rubber Factory, I presented an installation consisting of sculpture, video, found objects, and text. I looked into the subjects and their visual representations, such as memories, relationships, modifications of objects and images, and our consciousness within this prevailing era of technology, using specific personal experiences as a point of departure. By employing my body and mind as a platform to process information, like a doctor with a “medical gaze” on the human body, I held up a mirror to examine psychological experience and transcribe the abstract processes into a three-dimensional visual presentation.

Inspired by the character Ireneo Funes in Jorge Luis Borges’ novella Funes the Memorious, a man whose memories are forever imprinted in his mind as a vast mirror of the world, I envisioned myself in his mind, reimagining how those glimpses of moments would look and feel during one of Funes’ sleepless nights. While digging through those lucid, instantaneous, and indistinct moments of her own life, I reconnected certain fragments of objects and memories that converge upon one space, despite the differences in location and time.

This exhibition was a result from my residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York, and was supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan.

Title: 72˚
Medium: sculpture| tree stump, paint, stainless steel pipe, steel, resin, screws, nuts
Dimension: approx. 30 x 60 x 97 in

In the center of the installation is a sculpture titled 72˚, a tree stump painted neon orange and lifted by an angled metal pole high above us. Like the neon colors that blur the line between dreams and reality in Guy Maddin’s first color film, Careful (1992), this neon orange tree stump inside the gallery invites the viewers to walk into a somnambulistic state I had experienced when I was a young child.

Like the devastating avalanches that can be triggered by the turbulent emotion in the film, the tilted tree stump looks like it will slide down and crash into the viewers at any moment. This tree stump and many others I have collected are like little humans being forcibly cut off and pulled out from the ground. After being washed and altered, they are eventually displaced into a new environment, where they are unable to find their original spots to develop again from the same roots.

Title: Touching the Sky
Medium: sculpture| steel, plaster, paint, mirrored finished stainless steel sheet, neodymium magnet, wood
Dimension: approx. 36 x 14 x 64 in

A plaster cast of my own hand, with broken fingertips, faces a long vertical mirrored surface and reaches toward the other hand in its reflection. For this sculpture Touching the sky, I painted the plaster hand marine blue and pearl colors right after a brief romance had ended. While still processing the separation of my emotions from someone I had newly met, I discovered the song Green Grass written by Tom Waits and sung by Cibelle. This song is sung to a loved one from the prospective of someone dead in his or her grave, not wanting to be forgotten and not being able to let go of the loved one. Every time I listen to this song, I feel as if my late husband were sending me a message of how deeply he loved me but wants me to move on.

Suddenly, I feel my new and old memories about relationships intertwined together. Although each situation is distinct, my deep affections and sorrows toward every ending of a relationship are as fragile as this cast hand with two missing fingertips. While I was painting this hand, it seems I was unconsciously transferring my vulnerable emotions and permanently preserving this moment of fragility onto the plaster cast.

Title: (Buddha molds, each, no title)
Medium: sculpture| rubber, resin (found objects)
Dimension: approx. 10x 5½ x 5½ in

Several rubber molds of Buddhist figures created by my late husband, along with their resin and wax casts and altar elements, are displayed onto several mirrored surfaces. My late Puerto Rican-born husband was a Theravada Buddhist, and his artworks were much related to the investigation of Hindu–Buddhist philosophy and its place in contemporary life. Within the last three and a half years since his death, I have processed a kind of love–hate relationships with some of his belongings.

I have experienced everything from desperately holding onto his personal belongings and feeling overwhelmed by the memories I have projected onto the objects to detaching my feelings from those objects, but now most of his things have been donated or been kept by his siblings. I kept some of the molds and the extra casts of Buddha figures he sculpted for an art project titled Portaltar (2006). All of the finished altars with Buddha figures of specific characters he designed were given away and dedicated to specific persons. The extra casts I kept are either defaulted or pre-assembled. As an atheist and the daughter of former manufacturers, to me, they now look like they are simply objects taking part in some kind of assembling process. By demystifying their original religious meanings, I use them in the same way as other objects, as I am choosing to display them in this installation. Through an appreciation of the architectural structures and the organic texture of these modular pieces, I reposition his sculptures in ways that they originally were not.

Title: I Was Not Erasing You, I Was Just Afraid
Medium: sculpture | glass, vinyl text
Dimension: 19½ x 9¼ x ¼ in

Cracks like a splintery web are held in a double layer of safety glass. The vinyl text on the surface of the glass saying, “I was not erasing you, I was just afraid,” same as work title, becomes just a pattern-like image as it overlaps its reflection from the side view. This is a deferred response to my husband’s words when he saw I was deleting our digital photos from online albums. Not until three years after his passing from a long battle with cancer, when I read about Anna Freud’s explanations of the defense mechanism did I realize it was because I was afraid of losing a loved one.

Photograph by Kuo-Heng Huang