Featured in Vogue
Encirclement Scarf
Qi Bu Xin Cheng (棋布星陈), 2022
Printed on double silk twill
Qi Bu Xin Cheng (棋布星陈) is an abstract "Go" board with chimeric Chinese zodiac animals hidden in a floral border and printed on 36x36" double silk twill. Suspended in flight at the periphery of the grid, half-insect, half-zodiac creatures are both connected to and excluded from the region at the center of the world. This liminal state is emblematic of the Asian diasporic experience, each animal assimilating into the artist’s botanical border in their own unique ways, and to varying degrees of “success.”
The Chinese phrases for Go and scarf both include the character "wei" (围), which means to encircle. In Go, a stone is encircled and consumed, absorbed into the opponent's territorial architecture in the negative space it leaves behind. While captured stones are removed from the board, their legacy remains intact in the shapes and patterns left behind, and these ghostly contours ultimately come to define the colonizer’s existence. The immigrant experience is likewise governed by reflexive rules of consumption, assimilation, and identity creation. In liminal splendor, a new Chinese identity emerges from the American myths that perpetually shape and define it.
The creatures camouflage playfully into a pseudo-millefleur pattern and the comforting form factor of the scarf, echoing the artist's unflinching ambition to manufacture a version of Chinese identity that can be palatable and easily understood by Western audiences. Hidden in plain sight, colorful scenes literalize both the absurdity and familiarity of neo-Yellow Peril ideation coming back to haunt the American psyche. The viewer is forced to adopt the western gaze and examine Orientalist assumptions. In one scene, the artist herself casually washes a brain which turns into a snake in the pit of an avocado – a pithy critique of the American impulse to cast Chinese people as either brainwashed and incapable of independent thought or agents themselves of brainwashing.
The scarf's central motif seems to be reunification -- the simplicity of an abstract Go board both contrasts and blends in with the riot of life that has evolved on its blurred borders. Animals combining disparate, even contradictory elements, thrive in full bloom of life. The chaos of robotic monkeys, roosters wearing suits, teakettle sheep all spiral together into the eternal wheel of the Zodiac. Coincidentia oppositorum is accomplished as dialectical unity becomes its own aesthetic -- something completely new and born of opposites. In dramatic fashion, this piece pulls the viewer into frame, encircling them both physically and emotionally within the chaos and ouroboros of the contemporary Asian American diasporic experience.
