I LOVE YOU

At the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, this video is a feminist tour de farce exploring art history and the longing for intimacy. Reception on March 8, 2025 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at 410 Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90013.

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THE NEW WOMAN AND THE MODERN GIRL The synesthetic Organ “the New Woman and the Modern Girl” is part of “SOUNDS” curated by Michael Lewis Miller at the El Camino College Art Gallery. PUBLIC RECEPTION:  Saturday, September 10, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torance CA. 90506 (310) 660 – 3010 Gallery Hours:   Monday & Tuesday: 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Wednesday: 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Thursday: 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Visitors Parking is in the student lots  except J or K. SOUNDS  This is an exhibit exploring sounds in contemporary art, featuring Fatemeh Burnes, Robert Hilton, Tom Jenskins, Elana Mann, Mei Xian Qiu, Peter Rice and Susan Silton.  These explorations are compelling and varied,  ie.  creating an entire alternate musical vocabulary, birdsong as language, painting, and synesthetic storytelling. THE NEW WOMAN AND THE MODERN GIRL   is a synesthetic organ composing of 12 notes, corresponding to each month of the year of a prewar Shanghai Beautiful Girl Calendar.   The Shanghai beautiful girl models represented the epitome of beauty and glamour, and at the same time Westernization, depravity, and Western commerce.  Every note has an image, a corresponding sound, and variation of the fictional perfume “Shanghai 1928.”  The notes are housed in a recreated hutong which invites the visitor to spend time playing the organ by seeing, listening and smelling, and finally relaxing on wooden couches and partaking of treats.    The New Woman and the Modern Girl is an interactive story that allows the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions.  In the “woman question” discourse in China in the earlier half of the 20th Century,  the New Woman represented a positive view towards modernity and womanhood as ideal mothers and citizens, while the Modern Girl represented the struggle for women to find their own voice in a changing world.   INVITATION The Artist invites the Visitor inside the Hutong . The Artist invites the Visitor to view, smell and listen to each of the 12 notes. The Artist invites the Visitor to PUSH the white buttons to listen to each note.The Artist invites the Visitor to use the SAMPLE TESTER to smell each note (variations of the perfume Shanghai 1928),    by. 1) smelling the stone, or 2) dripping a drop on the stone, or 3) wearing the perfume on the wrist or behind the ears.The Artist invites the Visitor  to sit on the wooden couches, ponder,  converse, and nibble on treats provided in the bowl.

THE SOLDIER IN THE MIRROR and FUNDACION YAXS It has been a privilege to collaborate on an art investigation and participate in a residency with Fundacion YAXS, in Guatemala City, Guatemala.  The investigation, titled The Soldier in the Mirror, uses the cultural and artistic archives of the foundation as springboards to creating profoundly experimental work.  The Soldier in the Mirror consists of used U.S. government munition tins and mirrors, and employs real and semblances of violence to consider the inability for individual disengagement within a globalized economy from the greater socio-political theatre.  ARCHIVES   The archives of Fundacion YAXS are cloud based documentary memories of the cultural and artistic legacies of Guatemala and its people, existing outside of intense immediate and systemic pressure to dilute, erase, or alter such legacies.   See https://www.yaxs.org

ROLE OF CONTEMPORARY ART  Working on a Fundacion YAXS investigation is invariably a practice shifting or fine tuning process.  YAXS, through Paulina Zamora, mentors an artist to look at the foundation’s art and cultural archives from different perspectives, in order to arrive at work that can take off the mantel and taint of old outmoded paradigms, create something quite new and startlingly raw-skinned.

In the words of the foundation, “we are at a time when the arts are the last great territory of freedom of expression, and therefore, they must expand the breaking points that they exert on the system, strengthening the radical idea that artistic productions play a primordial role in the processes of subjectivation and socialization, and that art should be part of the symbolism of a culture not as an object of consumption but as an element for the construction of opinion, criteria and evaluation.”

THE SOLDIER IN THE MIRROR   This investigation consisted not only of going to Guatemala, but of watching and studying a great number of propaganda films within the foundation’s archives, to “hartazgo,” or to that point beyond satiety.  As an artist who addresses propaganda in its myriad of forms and effects, I ask — how can we process mixed truths, partial truths, created stories, denial stories of patterns of genocides, their causes, and their long elaborated historical foundations?  Within the  history of Guatemala, from the  guerilla war, the toppled democratically elected president Jacabo Arbenz, the assassination of  Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, other political machinations, and United Fruit are disturbing parallels to my own Indonesian history. 

We must consider our own role as an actor and consumer within the world theatre, whether intentional or not.  

During the investigation, used US Military munition tins were obtained  to be used not so much as decoys but as the vessel substitute — to shoot at within a 200 hundred yard range using .22 ammo.  This action creates a series of examinations.  The first examination is how rifle and shotgun feel in the hand, their power and inherent danger. Then the weapons force an almost automatic weighing and balancing of the role of self and the other, hunter and hunted, aggressor and victim, the strong and the weak.  The third introspection is an almost Zen like state where the weapon and the human holding it almost become one; where every breath, every heartbeat is observed, significant, and must be completely in sync if the weapon is to find its mark.  Lastly and chiefly, is the observation of the ingress and egress wounds of the bullets on the vessels, and the odd but potent realization the egress points are the gravest.If you know of who would be interested in showing this work, please let me know.

RESIDENCY  The residency is housed in a revived colonial building in the heart of Zone 1 of Guatemala City.  Inside the building are writers and definers of contemporary Latin American culture.  Going  to Guatemala was a revelation.  I found a country rich in people and soul, but with deeply rooted challenges that forces awareness of how active and enduring must be our struggle for equity, which can only happen with an appreciation and discourse of past inequities and injuries.

I was fortunate to be able to be able to work with, under the auspices of Fundacion YAXS, artists Paolo Spalletti, Inez Verdugo, and Manuel Chavajay – in community engagement  in San Pedro, on the sublime shores of Lake Atitlan, a place of spiritual and historical meaning.

August 28th – August 29th, 2021, noon-5pm

Medical Building, Del Amo Crossing: 21535 Hawthorne Blvd, Torrance, CA

The Torrance Art Museum (TAM) presents Nomad — this summer’s premier art event and the biggest pop-up of contemporary art in SoCal history featuring over 400 artists.

Nomad is a one-weekend only pop-up event for artists, by artists, to reforge our connections to each other in real life and to make new friends. It is for our audiences to once again commune with us through our practices. It is for curators and gallerists to catch up with what we have been doing in our studios over this isolating past year. We will come together to witness the power and value of engaging with art in person.

TUFENKIAN FINE ARTS       CROSSROADS, CROSSINGS, AND CONVERGENCE Curated by Fatemeh Burnes OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2:00 – 6:00 P.M. It is a truism that immigrants built the United States. However, that truism often obscures the true magnitude of the numbers and the panoply of cultures intersecting— sometimes colliding—and always evolving, together. Los Angeles is the epicenter of this cultural interaction. We are, without hyperbole, at the crossroads of the world, home to the largest populations of so many nationalities outside their own borders.In this diverse and dynamic environment, it is often women, who, on a daily basis, preserve and cultivate their particular cultures, while passing down their heritage to the next generation.Crossroads Crossing and Convergence 1 is an exhibition with a unique, non-traditional curatorial process–inspired by the conversations between two female immigrants who have lived in the same countries, with different upbringings, and now occupy different positions in the art world.These two women (an artist and an art dealer) are by nature motivated to explore the impact of the LA community on female immigrant artists and the influences of these artists on the LA art scene at large. The exhibition features a selection of first-generation immigrant female artists including Andrea Aragon, Fatemeh Burnes, Nzuji De Magalhaes, Gudrun Gotschke, Luigia Gio Martelloni, Lilli Muller, She Loves Collective and Mei Xian Qui. The exhibition will include a series of dialogues between and amongst art professionals to further connect women artists, educators, scholars, curators, and patrons, in an effort to re-examine the challenges, possibilities, and achievements within the Los Angeles artistic community.Crossroads Crossing and Convergence 1 features contemporary female artists of diverse ethnicities who immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. Crossroads signifies each woman’s personal story and how they apply and transform their cultures and/or converge them with other influences to help create LA’s unique creative environment. The artists in this show are a vibrant part of the LA art dialogue. Crossing evokes the crossing of a border, reaching a new horizon, and redefining boundaries. Convergence refers to intersectionality and how various cultures interweave and converge their identities, or resist doing so.The featured artists in the exhibition are women of diverse backgrounds making history, while ensuring that the vital pulse of LA’s art scene continues to beat in an every changing society between the Crossroads Crossing and Convergence. Our mailing address is: 216 S Louise St Glendale, CA 91205 818.288.4635 Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11:00 to 4:00 by appointment

We Are Here: Contemporary Art and Asian Voices in Los Angeles

Asian communities in Los Angeles abound with diversity. A multitude of ethnicities and nationalities from across the Asian continent are present here. Residents have sought fresh new opportunities, arriving as refugees, economic migrants, students, or professionals. In celebration of these communities, USC PAM presents seven dynamic female contemporary artists who embody the vitality of our city’s Asian populations. Each of these artists speak to the fluidity of an individual’s sense of place and self. Their artworks spark important conversations about the creation of art, memory, and meaning in complex social and cultural spaces. The galleries are interwoven with narratives that give voice to L.A. while simultaneously speaking to the transnational reality of life in the twenty-first century

With my work, I want not only the viewer to know that they are never alone in any of the minute or grand of human experiences, but also to look at ideas of culture, inter culturalism, and identity both imposed and invented in a more expansive way. – Mei Xian Qiu

Mei Xian Qiu (b. 1964) expands from her personal history to develop visually rich artworks that challenge viewers to consider the boundary between illusion and reality. Qiu was born on the Indonesian island of Java to a Chinese minority family who fled persecution. Her parents gave her three names (Chinese, Indonesian, and American) as a protective act to prepare her for multiple futures. The two designations she uses for her artwork are rooted in those names: Mei Xian Qiu, on her birth certificate but illegal under Indonesian law, and Cindy Suriyani, from “Cinderella” and the Malay Indonesian name meaning “sunny.”

In the aftermath of extreme anti-Chinese riots, her family immigrated to the United States and continued to move between the U.S. and Indonesia throughout her childhood. As she passes between cultures, Qiu navigates the three aspects of herself and continues to explore her transnational character. Qiu plays with archetypes and creates layered artworks that are rich in metaphor and meaning. Through photography, she treads a precarious line and speaks to the displacement she experiences as a result of her multiple heritages.

Three series are featured in this gallery; each reflects the artist’s experience traveling between China, Indonesia, and the U.S. Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom references Mao Zedong’s 1956 speech commencing a short-lived artistic and intellectual renaissance in China that ultimately resulted in a crackdown on independent thought. Homecoming: Once we were the Other was born from Qiu’s return to her mythical homeland. Through excavation of waste, Qiu captures a macro landscape that embraces the tension she felt during a residency in Beijing. In Dewi Cantik (Pretty Darling), Suriyani reexamines the Java of her childhood. Surrounded by rich colors, upbeat energy, and family stories, she cuts through layers of photographs to uncover the dichotomy between difficult realities and the comforting fictions used to cover them.