Tang / Achjadi
Menace surfaces in the sweet images
CHRISTINE REDFERN
Sugar Bombs is a fitting name for the current exhibition of prints by Diyan Achjadi and ceramics by Brendan Tang. The brightly coloured artworks by these two B.C. artists have a playful, childlike Pop Art feel at first glance, but upon closer inspection contain more menacing undertones.
Diyan grew up in Jakarta, with an Indonesian father and a Canadian mother. In an artist talk she gave recently at Concordia University, Diyan explained how in Indonesia, you are expected to be the same as everyone else. The conformity is obvious – even the children wear uniforms and learn to march in school, mimicking the militarism they see around them.
In North America, however, she says we are expected to be different. But Diyan feels this veneer of individuality camouflages our own cultural indoctrination. In particular, her images challenge the female stereotypes that are inherent in our society.
Brendan Tang’s ceramic sculptures combine the aesthetics of ancient Ming vases with contemporary Japanese manga. The Ming inspired elements appear very organic and lifelike, almost like body parts. The manga pieces look surprisingly like plastic robot bits, even though each sculpture is made entirely out of ceramic. I spoke with Tang before the opening about this series and exhibition.
Like Diyan’s art, does your pottery draw on your childhood?
I grew up in a family of four boys so I experienced a lot of robots, science fiction, the first generation of Transformers, that kind of thing. I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and grew up for the most part in B.C. I think the hybrid aspect of my ceramics is self-portraiture in a sense. My father is Chinese, my mom is East Indian, they are both from Trinidad and I grew up in Canada. There is a real mixing of cultures.
Why did you choose to merge Japanese and Chinese elements?
I think on the one hand that manga has become ubiquitous; it’s just a prevailing global style at this stage of the game, even though its origins are in Japan. Everything is being manga-fied, even Batman; there is nothing sacred anymore! Then there is this weird twist for me because I have an Asian background. Yet when we were raised in Ireland and then immigrated to Canada, my parents chose to go the route of assimilation, so in many ways I was raised as a Westerner. We never spoke another language at home, we never really talked about it, there was never a sense of urgency that my parents impressed upon us to look back at our heritage and embrace it. I think, at a lot of levels, it is because they were detached or displaced from their history as well.
Diyan’s work is very influenced by gender issues. Do you feel that your work is affected by questions of gender as well?
It is funny, because Diyan’s are very girlish illustrations and mine are boy-toy kind of objects. I think mine are subtly violent. Even if I’m referencing children’s toys, these robots and much of our advancement in technology have been vis-à-vis the military and that is definitely part of the discussion surrounding boy’s toys – robot toys.
Yet, in another sense, there is a bit of gender bending that goes on in Sugar Bombs. We have Diyan’s work where the females in the images are playing a very militaristic role and here I am using the language of the decorative arts, which for the most part is … female. Even within contemporary ceramics, sometimes it defaults that the maker or practitioner is a female or a gay male.
How did this series start?
The series is called Manga Ormolu. Manga is the Japanese anime that most people are familiar with. Ormolu refers to an 18th-century French practice of importing Chinese wares, and then, to make them more relevant to their own culture, they would put gold ornament all over them. They became these real curiosity objects. This mix of cultural appropriation and hybridization was something that was really kind of sexy in my mind. That was my Eureka moment. The series began with the vase and the robotic parts separate. One adorned the other, like an ornament. Then the robotic parts started imposing themselves onto the form, interacting with it and changing it. In my mind, I often think of these vases as symbols of a culture. And now the robotic parts are changing or tweaking or pinching or pulling this culture, or these ideas of culture. In a way, my ceramics are a visual illustration of what technology is presently doing.
