The Gradient | 2019

As part of my ongoing Manufracture Series, I continue to investigate the relationship between artmaking and manufacturing. In one of the large diptych billboard images, I overlap a picture of my father spraying blue paint onto a sheet of bonded leather for my art project with a photograph of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s artwork Venus of the Rags(1967). The other billboard image represents the grading color my father was spray-painting for my art project. The word “GRADIENT” merges with the background and becomes part of the image. By blurring the lines between intellectualism and craftsmanship and those between the knowledge of skills and the practice of skills, I pose an open question regarding the contradiction of the artist’s social status and how isolated contemporary art still is today.

As a daughter of a former bonded leather factory manufacturer, and an artist myself, I understand the important roles both manufacturers and artists play in our society. From Renaissance, Art Povera, to Duchampian art, artists have eventually been able to reclaim themselves as intellectuals. Until now, artists have been able to circulate themselves in the middle and upper classes. Yet, within their own close sector, artists still face repressions from the working class, and artists in general still cannot cross the gap to share their art with the majority of working-class people. With an overwhelming number of artists mostly produced by art schools, most emerging artists still have to join the labor workforce in order to sustain their artistic practice.

The Gradient was part of When Artists Enter the Factories, a large-scale indoor and outdoor group exhibition I curated at the Brooklyn Army Terminal launched during the 2019 Open House New York. For more information, please visit our Facebook Page.