Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean Curated by Steffani Jemison
May 30 – July 10, 2019
Mo Kong
All artwork Š Mo Kong unless otherwise noted. Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst. 1
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
STAFF
ADVISORY COUNCIL
Kate Buchanan
Executive Director
Katie Cercone
Theodore S. Berger Vernon Church Marcy Cohen
Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu
Steffani Jemison
Corina Larkin
Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director
Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Director
John S. Kiely
Eva Elmore
Lionel Leventhal
Lilly Hern-Fondation
Vivian Kuan
Rachel Maniatis
Christen Martosella Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen
Brian D. Starer Lilly Wei
Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus
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Development Coordinator Programs Associate
Polly Apfelbaum Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper
Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney
Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass
Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez Lilly Wei
Andrea Zittel
Irving Sandler (in memoriam)
CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines. This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2018-19 Open Call for Solo Exhibitions. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of panelists Andrianna Campbell, art historian; Steffani Jemison, artist; and Ali Banisadr, artist. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Steffani Jemison as the curator-mentor to Mo Kong.
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Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean Mo Kong
My work provides multiple perspectives instead of a statement. It reconsiders the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. It is deeply impacted by social events and coded by the “educational information system” to pose questions about the current political environment. My research-led process usually takes the form of large scale installations involving scientific research and journalistic investigations in which I challenge contemporary issues using complex narratives that synthesize the past with the present. The systems I build normally merge multiple environmental crises and sociopolitical issues. Through scientific research and social investigation, I try to find the similarities between systems and bring them into one narrative storyline. I translate research from biologists, geologists, and archaeologists into other physical materials. The boundaries of artifacts, information, and art are blurred in the installation by exposing
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the information in a neutral position to explore the different meanings of its complex contents. Our daily life and political views are difficult to separate from technology and science, therefore scientific perspective becomes an entry point for political events and the first layer of content in my work. Making sociopolitical art in China required me to learn to protect my identity, so self-censoring became an information-processing method in my installations. As such, in my work the audience is tasked with connecting the fragmented information between the revealed clues and hidden evidence. The work in this exhibition reflects my long-standing interest in natural sciences such as geology, biology and botany. This research process is highly synchronized with the recognition of my own positioning in complex historical and social events.
Since I moved to New York in 2015, the idea of the “Chinese-American” has become a subject of interest for me. In response to the critical immigration policies of today, I started my research on Chinese immigrants from the 1980s - 2000s who came to the US by migrating to other Asian countries first. In parallel, as a result of the China-U.S. trade war, Chinese honey is shipped to nearby countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia to avoid unfair tariffs, where it is relabeled for export to the U.S. This honey smuggling reveals the untrustworthiness of the labels, and asks whether we should re-examine our prejudices against immigrant culture. I wonder how long it will take for us to be accepted by the local community and how much our culture will be altered during the transplantation? Under the general category of Asian Americans, is our ethnic culture distinguished or misrepresented?
Mo Kong is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher born and raised in Shanxi, China and currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has had solo exhibitions at Artericambi Gallery, Verona and Chashama, NY, and his work has been included in exhibitions at the Queens Museum, NY, and the RISD Museum, RI. He has participated in fellowships and residencies at the Triangle Arts Association, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MASS MoCA Studio Residency, the Vermont Studio Center, Gibney Performance Center, and Chashama. His work was featured in the book Brand New Art from China by Barbara Pollack, and has been reviewed by Hyperallergic, the Wall Street International, The Round, and more.
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Steffani Jemison Curator-Mentor
Mo Kong is Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean. Trained in journalism, science, and fine art, he makes environments, grids, suspensions, atmospheres, and experiments. His ingredients are truths, half-truths, official reports, strategic fictions, scientific hypotheses, and very good guesses. True or false? “Facts are the images of history.” Science or speculation? “Images are the data of fiction.”1 Fact or fiction? “Dreams are the first false documents.”2 Where do facts, images, history, data, dreams, and documents meet? This slurry is the stuff from which Kong’s work emerges. Often manipulating living systems or embedding live objects within the inanimate (in this exhibition, pollen is suspended in resin, while desiccated fruit rests in an active freezer), he stages a strange encounter between the almostalive and the not-yet-dead, between the already obsolete proposal and the impossibly fantastic report. His work moves easily from the intimacy of the molecular to the unimaginable horizons of the geological or the nation-state. Kong often uses a
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single form to represent both topos and chronos—in this practice, history, the present, and the future contaminate and are contaminated by each other. This is a fact: Air has temperature and mass. The seam where a region occupied by cold air and a region occupied by warm air meet is called a front. This is a hypothesis, or a speculation: When China faces West and the United States of America faces East, they are both facing front. Whereas this is strategic fiction: The front is a boundary between right and wrong, between warm and cool, between good and evil. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? How do we describe the contours of the collision between China and the United States? The metaphor of the “front” (referring to the military, to weather, and to something like orientation or attitude) dramatizes the wild effects of inevitable collision. The word “pressure,” with its affective implications—as well as its connection to atmosphere and interaction—offers another way into his expansive practice.
Here’s a half-truth in the form of a report: As I write, I see storm clouds approach. The fact is: The clouds are moving, the earth is moving, but the movement is imperceptible to my eye. The fact is: A boundary can look and feel static. This happens when neither side is willing to budge. Natural law? Fact. Natural law? Fiction. Steffani Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including MASS MoCA, Nottingham Contemporary, Jeu de Paume, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Drawing Center, LAXART, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and others. Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kadist. Jemison has completed many artist residencies and fellowships, including the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, Rauschenberg Residency, the SharpeWalentas Studio Program, Studio Museum in Harlem
AIR, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Jemison holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University New Brunswick.
1 E.L. Doctorow, “False Documents,” American Review 26 (1977), p. 229. 2 Ibid, p. 232.
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PREVIOUS SPREAD Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean (Vegetation Zone), 2017 Paper pulp made with The New York Times, seedlings, tape Dimensions variable ABOVE Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean (Ants and World), 2017 Lollipops with earth print, ants, glue 4 x 8 inches RIGHT Lingering, 2017 Metal, marble, handmade rope, hornet nest, prints Dimensions variable
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Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean (Disappeared Lake), 2017 Stones, lead, prints 44 x 56 x 5 inches
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LEFT Roundtable No. 2, 2017 Tape, foam, metal, glass, prints, marble, ceramic tiles, battle fish 65 x 35 x 42 inches
BELOW Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean (Self circulation), 2017 Wood, magnifier, crystal, soil, ice cube with prints (iceberg shape) 28 x 12 x 16 inches
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Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean (Fungus), 2017 Fungus, bug light, digital prints 15 x 20 inches
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Making A Stationary Rain On the North Pacific Ocean (Map), 2017 World map, fly ribbon, moths 50 x 32 inches
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ABOVE and RIGHT (detail) Black Cloud, Thin Ice, 2018 Digital prints* on Photo Tex, hand blown glass, acrylic shelves, rubber, ceramic, sea shells, crocodile tooth, sponge, honey, shredded government documents, pollen, beeswax 54 x 120 inches *The digital prints are pollen images from five honey samples, created in collaboration with Shanxi Agricultural University and The Nature Lab at Rhode Island School of Design.
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LEFT AND RIGHT Stray, Landing, Seeing Stitches, 2018 Rubber, marble, neon, wires, hand blown glass pollen grains* Dimensions variable *Five groups in total with twenty hand blown glass pollen shapes. The glass pollen grains are from the index of pollen by Shanxi Agricultural University. Nineteen of the honey samples are from the artist's hometown.
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RIGHT and ABOVE (detail) Seeking The Common Ground, 2019 Mini freezer, handmade popsicles with newspaper confetti, dish racks, preserved tropical fruit, frozen cube fruit, plant lights 18 x 19 x 27 inches
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endless rain, flora, honey, neo-nationalism Danni Shen
“在北太平洋制造一场梅雨”(zai bei tai ping yang zhi zao yi chang mei yu, or, when translated into English, making a stationary rain on the North Pacific Ocean) was the phrase that came to mind for Mo Kong as the artist embarked on a research trajectory addressing relationships between migration, ecology, land use, climate change, human rights, trade wars, censorship, and the geo-politics of neo-nationalism and colonialism. Set within a Cold War period prophesized for a proximate future, Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean composes a weather report on the human condition, ever in the making. In this exhibition, weather becomes an allegory for the current political climate between the People’s
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Republic of China and the United States. Employing the methodology of a translator, Kong assembles multiple perspectives into new content and context. The contention over climate change thus becomes one entry point into Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean, to represent not only colliding political landscapes but also the personal traumas of immigration as a Chinese national living in the United States. Simultaneously activating place and space, Kong’s immersive, site-specific installation reconfigures typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. Innumerable relationships manifest within a closed, symbolic ecosystem that— below the surface—is resoundingly political and undulating. Rain becomes a poetic reading for the
Cold War: one constructed by unnatural human interventions and competing global superpowers, rather than by natural weather patterns and planetary movements. The seemingly never-ending rain is borne where cold and warm fronts of equal strength meet one another in a stalemate. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer concurrently encounters and navigates a gridded landscape segmented by painter’s tape. Here, the gallery plane operates as “place,” delineated by latitude and longitude in blue (80° E - 180° - 80°W 20°S - 0° - 90°N). Beyond the gravity of the floor, sculptural forms of varied shapes and materiality hover as political signifiers as well as markers in “space.” Various silicon-preserved and dehydrated tropical fruits, pollen-shaped glass works, living grass sculptures, battle fish, a mini-fridge of popsicles laced with newspaper confetti, hand-blown glass vessels of viscous honey, dioramic landscapes of stone, foam, salt, coal, and sand, are among the plethora of materials utilized. Also included are snailcovered scent diffusers that disperse two subtle notes based on a back and forth dialogue between
the two countries. Chinese tangerine is paired with anise and licorice, while American sweet orange is imbued with spearmint. While both citrus fragrances are of the same family, they are native to different localities. Each hybrid tincture created by the artist also infuses local herbs, flowers, and trees from numerous other locales. Scent and flora accordingly depict a damp and cooling United States against a dry and warming China. The hot and cold centers of the world are further represented by two sculptural poles which “function” together as a weather station that symbolically measures the intensity of these two global superpowers in this fictional landscape, where geographical changes become manifest. During different times of the day, an audio track plays weather forecasts where each country blames the other for the endless rain. While Kong’s practice reflects a long-standing interest in the natural sciences of geology, biology, and botany, the investigative journalist-turnedartist ultimately regards the research process as suffused with deeply personal, psychological positions within complex events. One such event
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includes the U.S. decision under Trump to exit from the Paris Agreement in 2020. After China vowed to take the lead on global environmental action, the 2017 conversation on climate change also became an arms race in technology that blurred the lines between economic development and neo-colonialism. Through journalistic inquiry that ranges from scientific and historical to media-based, the artist abstracts such information out of context and creates new juxtapositions for more expansive readings. Though objective lines are drawn here in the fictional 3D map, all lines are subjectively mapped and up for relative interpretation. For the artist, such installations thus become a kind of game, where the viewer actively looks for clues –some obvious, some subtle, some factual, some entirely fake news. A central clue to Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean is Kong’s continuing research on the international honey trade. The artist collaborated with the Brown University biology laboratories, Rhode Island School of Design Natural Lab, and Shangxi Agricultural University to recover pollen from five different honey samples from across the United States and China. After first examining various “American Honey” and "Made by American Bees” labels found on honey produced in the U.S., Kong began dipping into research drawing from a 2012 paper published by Shangxi Agricultural University that traced the origins of honey by testing pollen types. After comparing the recovered images from three labs, Kong observed that the exclusively Chinese Fagopyrum esculentum (Polygonaceae) was contained in “American” honey
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and embarked on a visual case study merging the history of honey bees, honey, and pollen with the history of human migration. As the artist informed me, the now endangered honey bee originated on the continent of Africa, but after two migration shifts arrived in central Asia and southern Europe. The first bee species introduced to the North American continent occurred in 1622 via European colonists. The “American bee” is therefore only a class of species that arrived in the United States along with colonial culture, and “American” honey contains correspondingly diverse pollen. Since then, the species Apis mellifera (the Italian bee) became the most commercially successful bee. Meanwhile, as a result of the China-U.S. trade war, honey smuggling remains a notorious enterprise. Chinese companies export honey to the U.S. relabeled as “Indonesian” or “Korean” in order to avoid bans and high taxes implemented on such products. For the artist, Making A Stationary Rain On The North Pacific Ocean is also a tongue-in-cheek, fictional account of an Asian bee purported to be an Italian bee to legally get into the United States. Within the artist’s assemblage, documents and news clippings relating to immigration, climate change, and the Paris Agreement are physically fused with honey samples in hand-blown glass vessels. A glass handrail and various globular vitrines are shelved in front of a wallpaper installation featuring magnified microscopic images of honey pollen. Rendered, clipped phrases such as “stop wandering and go home” and “tears
“Dream� Guid, 2018 Acrylic tubes, handrail brackets, hand blown glass, rubber, ceramic , honey, shredded government documents, pollen, beeswax, handmade lens, drawings 3 x 250 inches
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flow while walking” also provide perhaps the most autobiographical reflection of the artist’s encounters as a Chinese immigrant to the United States. As Kong mused in his studio, “there is another layer of neo-nationalism in the U.S. at this point. When we travel into a new environment, it is always a matter of how much time we need to be accepted, or how much our culture needs to be altered. This is a very complex situation or system. There is no easy answer. And countries are constantly opening up and closing. Right now, we are seeing them close — not just the United States and Europe, but all over the world. I see it as a natural cycle. We still need to be a bit optimistic about the future.” Reflecting on the rise of right-wing, antiglobalization xenophobia among other sentiments, Kong uses honey pollen as a metaphor gesturing toward personal experiences of cultural dislocation under the current neo-nationalist climate: invisible yet vital, pollen grains make their way depending on various conditions and barriers. Likewise, social classifications such as ethnicity, race, and nationality have little or no biological significance in humans, yet determine the possibilities for migration to where one calls home. Like a grain of pollen, Kong has set down roots despite the perils and odds. Working as a journalist while making socio-political art in China required the artist to learn to protect his identity. Self-censoring has led to the artist’s process of filtering information–clues and hidden evidence–in
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such a way that viewers are able to draw connections between disparate points of reference. Under the camouflage of scientific research, the work’s political subject comes in and out of focus. After studying art in graduate school, Kong came to the conclusion that objectivity and absolute truth vary in relation to experience and knowledge structures—in other words, there is no objectivity or absolute truth. In the studio, when I asked the artist what “good journalism” is, he replied easily: “good journalism gives people choices.” And good journalism has always been an integral part of Kong’s practice in that nothing operates as a black and white answer, medium, or perspective. According to the artist, the integrity of structure and judgment only increases with the expansion of perspectives offered. “I don’t believe media is objective, everything is perspective. Our reality is based on a set of concentric circles. Each outer circle we discover may flip the ‘truth’ upside down and complicate the ways in which we see. We never know which circle we are in and if there is another outer circle that exists.” And out in the North Pacific Ocean falls an endless rain.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. Danni Shen is an independent curator and writer. Most recently she was the Curatorial Associate at SPRING/ BREAK Art Show in LA and NYC, and previously worked as a Curatorial Assistant at Empty Gallery, a black-cube space dedicated to time-based, non-object-oriented, interdisciplinary practices physically located in Hong Kong. She is based in New York, where she was also the Curatorial Fellow at Wave Hill and Curator-in-Residence at Residency Unlimited. She is a contributor to various publications including BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, SCREEN界面, and has written catalogue essays for artists Jillian Mayer, Wonjung Choi and Rina Banerjee, among others. Mentor Sara Reisman is the Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, whose mission is focused on art and social justice in New York City. Recently curated exhibitions for the foundation include Mobility and Its Discontents, Between History and the Body, and When Artists Speak Truth, all three presented on The 8th Floor. From 2008 until 2014, Reisman was the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program where she managed more than 100 permanent public art commissions for city funded architectural projects, including artworks by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Mattingly, Tattfoo Tan, and Ohad Meromi, among others for civic sites like libraries, public schools, correctional facilities, streetscapes and parks. She was the 2011 critic-inresidence at Art Omi, and a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, awarded by the Foundation for a Civil Society.
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CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.
MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb Compass Group Management LLC The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Vedder Price P.C. New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
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All artwork Š Mo Kong unless otherwise noted. Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst. 33
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