The title for this exhibition is selected from a constellation of works by the Asian-American artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee. The first unfolding comes from the artist's desire to excavate her family's history. In Unfolding Nai Nai (fourth floor) the artist reaches out to her aunts, uncles and father to learn more about her paternal grandmother. An émigré who was displaced by the Communist Revolution in 1949, Nai Nai took her four children and flew first to Shanghai, then eventually out of China. The work's own opacity mirrors the challenge in reconstructing the life and personality of a family member through the lens of those surrounding her. By the time Nai Nai is interviewed a sense of her indomitable personality and penchant for artistic creation is already established. She shares her experience of rearing children and demonstrates her focus and skill at transforming discarded paper into functional objects and crafty representations. Through these scenes we recognize an immediate connection to her own granddaughter's creative output. Unfolding Connections tracks a contemporary artist's search for knowledge, identity, and understanding as she unravels the web of mediations that obscure and contain her families roots in China.
The piece What It's Like, What It Is on the top (fifth) floor brings us back immediately to the recent history of the 2020 pandemic. The global health crisis unleashed a local thinly-veiled xenophobic hostility toward Asian-Americans as misinformation on the COVID-19 virus' origin began to spread throughout the internet. Asian-Americans found themselves a target in their own communities, and this piece was made, as the artist states:
A text-based animation made in collaboration and solidarity with the Asian American community in NYC when violence against Asians erupted at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Made in homage to Adrian Piper's video installation, "What It's Like, What It Is #3 (1991)," a … video displays words submitted by members of the community: both derogatory and stereotyping words that they have been labeled by strangers, as well as positive words that reframe, redefine and reclaim their identity.
The simplicity of the work shows the mobility and power words have to shape, reassert or attack notions of what it means to be Asian and American in New York City. The piece appears here as a single channel video iteration of a two-channel work. The animated quality of the words flashing on and off on each screen (in rapid intervals) reflects the speed at which these notions and words circulate in the public domain. From piecing together her matriarchal roots, to utilizing art to dispel erroneous misconceptions, the artist turns her attention to the Internet. Can the channels of communication which make up the Internet help us understand who we are as citizens? Are our ethnic roots accessible through clearly monitored, often privatized and curated lines of communication? Do older forms of communication, oral history, testimony allow us a more direct understanding of our present and our past? These are some of the questions that drive Lee's work. Her photographic series Passages III featured in the display cases on the fourth and fifth floor document the artist's trips to her family's country of origin, China, as well as diasporic “homes” in Taiwan, Hong Kong and New York City. The photographs capture transnational residents framed by political history, and impacted by their cultural and economic interactions with the West. Street scenes show the city's inhabitants carrying out their daily lives as the artist discreetly records their presence. In addition to her family's own journey, Passages III also shares the artist's interest in oculi and their ability to both shape and direct light as it moves from one space into another.
Finally Unfolding Connections culminates in the artist's work, FIREWALL Cafe, on floors two and three. FIREWALL looks at China's primary search engine, Baidu and allows you to compare it simultaneously to our own most widely used search engine, Google. The comparison of image search results reveals how some keyword searches are curated or at least directed toward a specific area. An image search of “3D printed weapons” using Google displays a variety of ghost guns, while the comparable search in Baidu only shows one image of a printed gun amongst a larger collection of images of knives. Based on these searches one gets a sense of the limits of both search engines, and how their predetermined limits can shape our dominant imaginary. The difference is subtle, but as the amount and scope of your searches accumulates, the results raise a number of questions. What pool of data is Baidu searching? And is it part or separate from a larger database of images available to Google users? Are the results algorithmically filtered in real time, or are their independent parameters native to the search engine itself? As the artist reveals in her documentary on the artwork, Invisible Visible, the censorship is layered. Companies in China who want to have a web presence must register their website with the government and must abide by government regulations. In addition to this, Lee suspects searches are also determined regionally depending on where you are located in China. The “Golden Shield Project,” (as the artist states) imposes external filtering on websites, a practice often referred to as the “Great Firewall of China.” Lee's project did not go unnoticed by Chinese authorities in 2016, and was subsequently presented in a number of sites internationally.
The third-floor iteration of FIREWALL Cafe, allows visitors to see and browse through keyword searches that were executed since the project's inception in 2016. The project remains as relevant today as the year it debuted. The banning of Tik Tok in the United States recently reanimates the battle over censorship and internet freedom. Lee's work displays in real time how politics interfere with our ability to seek truth and understand the greater world we live in. Should state policy govern how we shape our notions through accessible media? Unfolding Connections takes us through that complex process of forming our own identity, and understanding how notions of truth are shaped by media and our socio-political environment.
Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Unfolding Connections is curated by Dennis Delgado, Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, CUNY. The exhibition is designed and produced by Maya Hilbert, manager of the New Media Artspace gallery, and the Student Docent Team. Current docents include: Anika Rios, Cindy Qiu, Amely Gonell, Shaima Rini, and Dylan Shalmer. The exhibition is supported by the Baruch College Student Technology Fee and is made possible with further support from the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC), the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the Newman Library. All images appear courtesy of the artist.
Joyce Yu-Jean Lee is a visual artist who combines video, new media, glass sculpture and installation with social practice and institutional critique. Her artwork examines how media, technology and culture shape notions of truth and understanding of the "other."
She recently exhibited at The Delaware Contemporary and Kreeger Museums; and her artwork has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hong Kong Free Press, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic and on BBC Radio. She received grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Arts Mid-Hudson, Asian Women Giving Circle; Franklin Furnace Fund, Maryland State Arts Council and The Walters Art Museum; and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center,Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower and Hamiltonian Artists.
Her project about Internet censorship, FIREWALL Cafe, garnered backlash from Chinese state authorities in 2016 and has been presented at the Hong Kong Center for Community Cultural Development, Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ) and the Oslo Freedom Forum in New York, Norway and Taiwan.
Joyce received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Pratt Institute in NYC. She has also taught at Marist University (formerly Marist College), Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), MICA, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design and New Jersey City University.