Yiqing

Sun

As an artist, I work between cultures: I’m a Chinese woman artist currently working in the US. From this vantage point, I look at what it means to be female and Asian. In my early work, this involved using images from Chinese art history and the act of cutting paper, an intricate practice that was often delegated to women, without recognition. I cut into reproductions of traditional prints and paintings to look closer at life and think about gendered cultural assumptions and the work of daily life.

When I moved to the United States, I was fascinated by the prominence of household appliances as symbols of labor. I started to make installations using dryer lint. This material is a residue of housework, coming from laundry. I collected the lint and used it to create sculpture, installation, photography, and mono-prints. The tiny fibers that came from my own clothing take on a curious palette and form an abstract document of my daily life.

Through recycling and reusing the dryer lint, I create a cycle of materials. I work with silkscreen to connect this relationship. Lint is captured in a very similar way to the process of screen printing: The dryer takes wet clothes as the raw material and squeezes them through constant tumbling, eventually making a flat lint fabric on the dryer’s screen filter. The process screen printing pushes paint through the screen onto the matte paper, making residue confidently visible in the textured mono-prints that result. They are amoeba-like shapes in striated colors. This gesture is akin to highlighting the acts of housework done by countless of unacknowledged female ‘workers’ It is also a cycle in which the leftover, after experiencing constant neglect, lint and screenprinting imprint on each other, together presenting the intense quest of wanting to be seen.

I am using the idea from Taoist thought to make images in the circular format. In Eastern philosophy, the Chinese meanings of the circle are happiness, completeness, and the perfect unity of two opposing elements. I often use the color red, which signifies power to give greater visibility to my humble sources. Now I am two cultures. The circle in China represents the state of consummation of birth, the end of one cycle and the birth of another, life is full of constant cycles, like tomorrow always comes after today.