MODERN TIMES
Based on a 1960’s photograph of a daydreaming cafeteria worker, Modern Time (L) presents a double image of two very different dreams. On the right a worker is momentarily lost in a reverie, yet caught in the modern dream of a socialist utopia, whose pantheon of theorists and politicians (Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin) hangs above her on a wall of Chinese red. On the left, that same worker – now taking on the musings of the artist – dreams of a different modernity, one less rational, more fluid and expressionistic, than political ideology might allow. The portraits above her are by – and in one case, of – Vincent Van Gogh, whose tragic alienation from modern society suggests individual nightmares as much as collective dreaming. Meanwhile, the Mao-clocks on the shelves around the painting tick away as modern time unwinds its revolutionary inevitability.
Post Age (R) is based largely on a 19th century photographic postcard of a massive stone statue of an imperial warrior standing guard over the famous Ming Tombs near Beijing, the painting “Post Age,” 2000, serves as a kind of postmodern post card for layers of images, stamps, and inscriptions that seem to drift in from different eras of Chinese history and stake their claims to the common ground the painting represents. The stone warrior anchors the picture; a peasant, photographed while smoking, sits patiently in the lower right-hand corner; from the left, the philosopher Lao Zi enters the scene riding an ox (his preferred mode of transport), as if in from the ancient past; at the upper right, a large, reddish imperial postage stamp marks the surface as if the large painting were a small postcard. Meanwhile, the artist’s well-known painted circles, like effervescent thought bubbles, mark the painting’s surface as her own personal stamps. All the images in “Post Age” are waiting at the intersection of history, like messages gathered in a post office for delivery to each other.
Based on a 1960’s photograph of a daydreaming cafeteria worker, Modern Time (L) presents a double image of two very different dreams. On the right a worker is momentarily lost in a reverie, yet caught in the modern dream of a socialist utopia, whose pantheon of theorists and politicians (Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin) hangs above her on a wall of Chinese red. On the left, that same worker – now taking on the musings of the artist – dreams of a different modernity, one less rational, more fluid and expressionistic, than political ideology might allow. The portraits above her are by – and in one case, of – Vincent Van Gogh, whose tragic alienation from modern society suggests individual nightmares as much as collective dreaming. Meanwhile, the Mao-clocks on the shelves around the painting tick away as modern time unwinds its revolutionary inevitability.
Post Age (R) is based largely on a 19th century photographic postcard of a massive stone statue of an imperial warrior standing guard over the famous Ming Tombs near Beijing, the painting “Post Age,” 2000, serves as a kind of postmodern post card for layers of images, stamps, and inscriptions that seem to drift in from different eras of Chinese history and stake their claims to the common ground the painting represents. The stone warrior anchors the picture; a peasant, photographed while smoking, sits patiently in the lower right-hand corner; from the left, the philosopher Lao Zi enters the scene riding an ox (his preferred mode of transport), as if in from the ancient past; at the upper right, a large, reddish imperial postage stamp marks the surface as if the large painting were a small postcard. Meanwhile, the artist’s well-known painted circles, like effervescent thought bubbles, mark the painting’s surface as her own personal stamps. All the images in “Post Age” are waiting at the intersection of history, like messages gathered in a post office for delivery to each other.
