Title: “Altered Ambiance”
Essay for Art Exhibition Publication
Publication: 1a Space Booklet
Date: Spring 2008
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1a Space – Altered Ambiance
Conversation with Magdalen Wong, Yuk King Tan, Nadim Abbas, YY Ma, Saturday February 16, 2008 (Anastasia Wong contributing by email)
By Samantha Culp

“Space” is one of those terms that is so commonly used (abused?) in art discourse, it’s hard to figure out what it even means anymore. Luckily for “Altered Ambiance”, curator Magdalen Wong and the four artists are taking a close, richly nuanced look at the subtle environmental changes that affect human perception of the space around them. It’s perhaps fitting that a few weeks before the exhibition, there are only rough outlines for what some of the works will be, as the show calls into question the relationships between work and venue, work and audience, and artists with one another. Many of the details will only be decided during installation, as artists are still negotiating their piece’s effects on the “ambiance” of the whole. All the same, the curator and artists (including Anastasia Wong, who was in the US but piped up via the magical space of email) gathered to discuss space, place and diffusion, with some interesting results.

SC: Magdalen, as the curator, can you talk a little bit about the origins of this exhibition?

MW: When this project started off, I was planning an experimental sound event, and was thinking a lot about ambiance in relation to sound, and how sound can really change a space. Later on it developed into an exhibition with the theme of “altered ambiance”— instead of focusing on sound, I really wanted to talk about space. Not just about how space is utilized or understood, but really how people act within a space, and how their actions are dictated by the changes within the space.

SC: Can the artists each tell me a bit about what they’re planning for the show?

YYM: Well, I wanted to do some kind of performance, but it’s a video performance… Actually I don’t like doing performance, I kind of hate it (laughs). I was thinking about the fact that when I went to the July 1 protest, everyone was shouting things but everyone was kind of out shopping as well. I just found it quite interesting, I had never seen anything like that before. You know, it was everyone going out for a picnic or something… At first I wanted to make this performance quite political, but I realized I didn’t have to, so all the words I’m going to shout are about pop culture in HK, like “Andy Lau” or the stock market, just random things like that.

SC: How did you decide to shoot it on site, and how does the design affect the meaning of the piece?

YYM: We do have time before the exhibition to build the walls, the room, shoot it and everything… the room will be completely white, because even though the piece is about Hong Kong, I want to dissociate it. It could be elsewhere.

SC: Nadim, can you describe your piece and your work process?

NA: For this I’m going to make use of the former cattle trough in 1a Space, and I’m going to fill it with liquid. I wanted to do some installation/sculpture on the theme of crying…. But that’s just a loose way of starting, for me to find some kind of focus. Basically, a lot of this happens when I pick up the objects— it only happens to me when I start to play with my onions or my little squishy bottles or whatever, and eventually it starts to come together, and it’s all based on an image in my head.

SC: So why did you choose onions for this show?

NA: The thing about onions as a metaphor is that, well, they make you cry, so there’s the crying theme, but also this identity thing as well. There’s this play about a giant and he’s thinking about his identity, and he’s got this onion and he’s peeling the onion, trying to find his identity. But he peels off layers and layers of the onion, and keeps peeling until he gets to the center, and there’s nothing there, because an onion has no core. So that has to do with putting yourself into the work as well.

SC: Anastasia, your animations also have to do with “identity” in a way—can you talk a bit about that?

AW: The animations are of objectified figures behaving in controlled situations; being formed together and struggling to be apart. The lack of individuality and the idea of a group or a ‘coming together’ are the main properties of these simple animations. There is no narrative, no story with a beginning and ending, no climax. All is one continuous behavior of being part of everyone and a muted desire to be separate from the togetherness.

SC: Yuk, you’re planning to stage an installation on the topic of domestic helpers, and their unusual position in Hong Kong’s “space”. Can you talk about your view on the politics of installation art itself?

YKT: I’m really excited by the idea of “altered ambiance” or altered space, because as an installation artist, and I do call myself that, it seems to be about being incredibly sensitive to other artists and to the environment in the process of doing an intervention or transformation, or something between all those different aspects. I quite like the political idea about making an installation because you need to think beyond the idea of your own self or the role of the institution, and deal with the politics of how it all works out–artists working together or not working together, what a curator is…
Once I was invited with a group of other artists to do a show in a New Zealand museum, connected to this idea of “reinvigorating the dead space” of the museum, the idea of getting more visitors in. I did this work that I really loved, where I put strip lighting on the top of a vitrine, and blacked out the vitrine glass with black adhesive. The lights would go strobing on the top and then go strobing on the bottom, and every so often the whole vitrine would light up as well. But unfortunately the museum was annoyed that there were so many lights reflecting on other things, and that it was antagonistic to the other artists because it was so overwhelming. So they closed the show down early. So it’s about being sensitive and being not sensitive; I’m kind of playing around those lines.

SC: How do the other artists feel about these issues of sensitivity, fairness, and distraction that go into exhibition planning? For instance, what do you think is the ideal spatial condition for your work to be presented?

AW: Lots of space. I like lots of space, but I don’t have a specified idea of how my works should be displayed. Being able to show and share the works are more important. I prefer working with the unpredictable, because that’s just more natural and realistic. Not everything can be planned, although organization and visual communication are important in ways to reach the public. The world kind of runs in a chaotic but organized way; society needs control, and sometimes people need to be told what to see or do.

YYM: My stuff always gets put in the corner, I don’t know why… At a graduation show, mine was even put in a separate room with a door. A lot of my pieces have sound, so it’s kind of hard to put together with other pieces.

SC: Well this gets back to the basic theme of “ambiance”, which you normally think of as referencing sound or light. Even with film or video-making, ambient sound is a big issue, of how much there is that you can’t “get rid of”—it’s the bottom layer. Within an exhibition space, if there’s something that has sound and the others don’t, and you’re looking at a photograph but hearing this sound, does the sound become a part of that work, or your experience of that work? It’s an interesting issue.

YKT: That’s a HUGE issue. The people who say, “I’m working with sound or moving image,” they always get first-go (much laughter). I mean with the organizers, to figure out where to put them, but also for with the viewers, because they go first to something that moves or has sound because that’s the most exciting thing.

AW: Video projection is a significant element added to a space, as it changes the tone or the mood of the space. It also changes the way the space should be viewed; it gives instructions to the audience, and guides them into seeing the space. It tells whoever is in a space that there is something happening; there is light and movement and you should look at it.

MW: For this show, however, I really wanted to use the word ambiance not just about sound or light… ambiance is not really about sound; it’s basically about space. How we feel in space, the relationship within the space, the mood. If it’s just a space, there’s actually no ambiance. Why? Because we’re not there to feel anything. If the tree falls and there’s nobody to listen to it… right? Ambiance is a reaction of us towards a space, which could be changed because there’s a sound, there’s a light, there’s a smell. Ambiance is always changing us to react in the space.

Yuk: I also don’t want the show to be only that “ambiance” is something really subtle, because that limits ambiance as well…
N: Basically it’s the human factor. It’s space with the humans in it, so it can be as extreme or as subtle as humans are.

EXTRA BOX: Space vs. Place

SC: What would you say is the difference between space and place—how would you define it, and is it a useful distinction in relation to the “altered ambiance” theme?

MW: A place is something that’s already been measured whereas—space… is just a space. When you say something is a place, I consider it already known or categorized or measured– I don’t know, it’s like time, time is like measurement, place is a space that’s been measured.

NA: Or you can say that a place is a space that has time…

MW: Maybe, yeah.

NA: Well that’s history right, history is a place that has time?

YYM: A place is a location, quite literal in a sense, where you can sit. But a space is something you can’t really see.

AW: Space is infinite: it can be time that tells duration; it can be distance, area and volume; it doesn’t have to be physical; it is boundless. There’s deep-space, dead-space, breathing-space, blank space, etc. Place is a physical environment; it can be pinned down and specified. It can be a location, a region, a surface and so on. It can be a position, or status. A status of a state of mind, or a status of a species in the world.

YKT: A place assumes something inherently quite localized, has its own inherent history, and works within a sociopolitical context. While space could be something quite abstract.

SC: It’s interesting that everyone’s defining it in their own way.

YKT: I always think that “site” is such an interesting word; it implicitly contains the idea that something will happen there, that there will be drama or that there is a situation or that something will change.

NA: Now we have to find a word to compare site with—site and kite? (Laughter.)

Title: “i.e.llusions”
Essay for Art Exhibition Publication
Publication: 1a Space Booklet
Date: Spring 2008
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I.E.llusory Diagrams
Samantha Culp

What would a Venn diagram of the I.E. group look like? A nest, a scribble; a logician’s nightmare, a graphic designer’s masochistic joy.
Countless circles overlap and diverge, starting with the separate spheres of seven individuals that first converged in Chicago. Other geographic tags must be added in: Hong Kong, various American hometowns, current cities of residence, show locations near and far. Varying materials, forms, and themes further complicate things. Does a circle labeled “sculpture” simple cross over part of the drawing, or does it surround the whole thing? Do the subtly different concerns of “humor”, “wit”, and “comedy” each receive their own circular field, or must they share a single one?
Somewhere in the midst of these intersecting elements exists a space called I.E. To call it an artists’ group is possible, however, as the verbal graphing above illustrates, too simplistic. But the slippery nature of this grouping is part of the point, and connects to other concerns within the works of each individual artist and their association as a whole.
I.E. is nothing if not mischievous. A sense of sheer mischief pervades most of the group’s work, and their very being. The artists have openly alluded to the “marketability” of being a group instead of mere individuals, which could be seen as the first of many tricks being pulled (turned?) in a given show. The style and concept of the trick, the game, the joke and the con are regularly employed, most notably by Ross Moreno who performs deliberately awkward magic tricks combined with equally awkward comedy. Magdalen Wong’s “vapor”, a small jelly heart, slowly disappeared during the span of the “Illusion” show (a trick in slow-motion). Static visual puns can be found in Justin Cooper’s “Fin”, in which a real shark fin bought in Hong Kong points up toward a tiny JAWS logo, and in Benjamin Bellas piece plugging a Hong Kong light into a Hong Kong outlet… but with more than a dozen power converters in between. This unnecessary “excess” is matched by Bellas’ characteristically long title, which begins “There are nights” and goes on theatrically, almost uncomfortably, for several lines. His titles are almost poems, and walk the line between moving and over-the-top, which seems again to be a conscious strategy, common to many of the artists, to test humor through awkwardness, discomfort, or the boldly inappropriate.
Noelle Mason presents a video (“Redman”) which is confrontational both in its text, chanted by the artist (a rather offensive but childlike song about Native Americans) and the shocking slaps from an opponent that redden Mason’s face and cause a nosebleed. Her crashed chandelier shows a more abstract violence, but is lightly absurd in its destroyed beauty; her X-Ray of an ivory Buddha about to be smuggled back to the States within her own body is blasphemous and cartoonish at once. The sped up visuals and beyond-chipmunk voice of Justin Cooper’s video “Studio Visit” make it goofy, but gradually grating, and finally nauseating.
Besides humor in the more hysteric, confrontational mode, there is also the softer humor of dissipation, crummy structures and systems, loss and ruin. Clinton King’s “Rug Burns” is a small sculpture made from wrapping paper tubes, and fluorescent lights, and is about to fall down at any minute—his cactus wrapped in Silly String (“Why do they call if sobering up when you’re coming down?”) similarly droops like the proverbial hangdog. Justin Cooper presents a tiny TV screen that plays a nature documentary on the floor—epic dreams and adventure fantasy reduced to pop-up ad-size. Ross Moreno’s “Cuddly Pig” head barks out electronic noises from the floor and has the same deflated look as King’s cactus.
Humor, in all its varieties, seems to be an essential circle in the I.E. diagram. And somewhere in the middle of all the crosshatching, there is still that space that creates the group. Fractured in style, but inching toward a common horizon of sculpture: the curated show that is “the new sculpture object”. Individual pieces that do have relevance in the whole. Alone but together. Pulling the good trick, for the sake of what is revealed in the process.

Title: “Asian Cultural Council, Twenty Years in Hong Kong”
Book Editor: Samantha Culp
Publication: Original anniversary book by non-profit arts organization Asian Cultural Council
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Title: “Kodachrome Cowgirl”
Publication: The Cowboy Issue
Date: 2005
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(Juanita Kelley Gardens: September 17 1928- July 4 2005)

My grandma wasn’t a cowgirl. That is to say, she never wrangled cows, nor worked with them in any way for that matter. The closest she got to the cattle industry was probably setting cocktail glasses down next to rib-eyes on the gilt tables of Hollywood and Las Vegas nightspots in the 1950s.

Of course, she didn’t start out there—she was born in Kingman, Kansas, but like everybody else, kept moving West. First, as a child, to Arizona (I want to see a taut canvas bow blocking out the sun and wooden wheels nearly missing the horns of a bleached skull, but it was probably by cheap all-night bus). Then, shortly after graduating Yuma High School (the yearbook pictures show an almost even split between pale and dark faces, the transplanted Okies and the Mexicans and the kids from the reservation—my grandmother hardly the only Juanita in the captions, though she had already taken to calling herself by her surname, Kelley), she married a young man just back from the war, and moved to California. In Santa Barbara, her new husband picked fruit (Watermelon? Cantaloupe? Strawberries?), until they went back to Yuma to have the baby, and soon after that, the divorce. When she left again, it was in pursuit of her child, kidnapped by her ex-husband, and presumed to be hidden somewhere in California. Her career as a cocktail waitress began here, as she scrambled to cover the private detective fees by serving drinks to movie stars at The Dollhouse in Palm Springs. A car accident in downtown Los Angeles, a Herald-Examiner reporter with a good memory for missing-child posters and some phone calls later, mother and baby were reunited after almost two years.

As a single-mother in Hollywood, she worked at The Melody Room (much later when it was called The Viper Room, River Phoenix would overdose there), and attended secretarial school, which briefly led to bookkeeping for a janitorial company where a giant bulldog named Jiggs would sit under her desk and pass gas all day. She soon went back to cocktails. The night’s uniform: fishnet stockings, black taffeta skirt, starched white shirt, high-heeled gold wooden clogs. She had to wear contact lenses too, but it being the 50s, these were big slivers of glass that lined her lids pink and trapped hours-worth of cigarette smoke in her eyes. Sometimes she’d take her daughter to work, where the little blonde girl would be plopped onto the top of a baby grand and sung to. She married again, to a movie-magazine photographer who was about to become the assistant publicity manager for the Flamingo Hotel, and in 1958 they all headed back into the desert. Las Vegas at this time was little more than a few hotels in a line (the nascent “Strip”), run by gangsters, filled with glamorous people, with coyotes skulking at the edge of the floodlights. It was in its own way a frontier town, and celebrated this every year with something called Heldorado, a week wherein the entire city would dress in Western clothes (spurs and all), send silver-saddled horses down a parade route, and spend time in a carnival jail to raise money for the Junior Chamber of Commerce. You can almost hear the Patsy Cline drifting out of the casino speakers, while Kelley delivers and clears shots of red-eye.

There was another divorce and another marriage (this time to a craps dealer who came from a family of croupiers), and another divorce, and yet another marriage. Her fourth and last husband swept her out of the cocktail lounge and into the high country; she never had to work again.

Max Gardens was an unusual kind of cowboy— former professional bowler (some of his Bowling Hall of Fame records have never been broken), owner of adult theatres in downtown L.A., Jewish—but he fit the part. He had owned a dude ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming called the Flying A, which was now sold off except for a little patch of land. This became the Little Flying A, where Max and Kelley would spend about four months each year when not in Encino, building a small house and then a guest-house, having guests over for drinks, fishing, buying turquoise jewelry and fine silver work from Indian artisans.

I imagine it was Max who took this photograph, on some clear afternoon in big sky country, in the days spent “up at the ranch.” The sun is bright, and she squints a bit as she smiles. She looks so happy here, in her white Stetson and faded jeans, her shining copper hair, her turquoise and silver.

Later, when the Little Flying A went the way of the Big, they moved to Mission Viejo and slowly began to reflect the place’s name. Later, of course, came breast cancer, radiation, chemotherapy, double-mastectomy, emphysema, Alzheimer’s. Later Max died, and Kelley lived with her malicious Persian cat, Taz, and after the cat died, a ceramic bust of a cat that looked slightly similar. Later she went alone on senior citizen package tours with names like “The Sentimental South,” and had just confirmed the trip of a lifetime to China when she was mugged inside her Beverly Hills apartment’s parking garage, and could never fly nor drive a car again. Later she couldn’t breathe without an oxygen tube, she spent one week out of every six in the hospital, and wasn’t allowed to eat her favorite foods (Mexican) or drink her favorite beverages (Mai Tais). And later, actually less than three months ago, she died.

This is not to say that nothing good ever happened after the photograph was taken. Many things did—she discovered a passion for oil-painting, took a newly-arrived Vietnamese refugee family under her wing, traveled Europe, had grandchildren and great-grandchildren, donated to charities, charmed shift nurses, saved every bit of wrapping paper from every present she ever received. In this picture, though, the sad things are, miraculously, only in the past or the future. I like to see her like this, still in her long mountain honeymoon, weight on one hip, leather satchel slung. She doesn’t know yet that the West is lost in the very same moment it is won; that she will someday run out of continent. But none of us ever do.

Here she is, for a second, standing in the sunshine. She is waiting to laugh until the shutter releases.