On November 1, 2022, in the Chan Gallery of Pomona College, we recorded a conversation between Pearl C. Hsiung, artist and visiting painting professor 2022-2023, Maddie Rubin-Charlesworth, art major and co-curator of the Painting: New Approaches exhibition, and Tricia Avant, lead curator of the Painting: New Approaches exhibition and gallery manager.
Pearl spoke to us about their work in the Painting: New Approaches exhibition held in the Chan Gallery during the fall 2022 semester. While the conversation was centered around Pearl's paintings in the show, it also delved into their work's philosophical and political underpinnings. There is a section where Pearl speaks about how their practice has evolved over the last few decades, and sometimes, we digressed to discuss other works in their oeuvre. What follows is a transcription of our conversation.
Maddie Rubin-Charlesworth:
First, we want you to tell us a bit about your work and what ideas you are working with and media.
Pearl C. Hsiung:
In general, my work is about the relationship between humans and nature as mediated through
the landscape. Specifically, the landscape as a genre, site, and medium, and the negotiations between these elements. My landscape paintings convey multiple ideas in the construction of the landscape.
Tricia Avant:
Interesting. What were your thoughts when conceiving the works in this exhibition?
PCH:
In this painting Simurgh II, I was doing a series of waterfalls at the time. I was thinking about being [both] irreverent [and] sincere, knowing that equating bodies of land with female anatomy is silly. But at the same time, it appealed to me in an erotic way, as in Audrey Lord's erotic, where there is a sense of accessing something like the deep recesses of feelings of power. She talks about the erotic as a space between the edges of the self and the chaos of that which is unbounded, the boundary between the sense of self and the chaos [of being]. It is such an enormous gulf, which I find often expressed in natural forms and formations.
MRC:
You mentioned the title of your works, Simurgh II and They (Nachi). Can you elaborate on the titles and their meaning?
PCH:
Simurgh is a Persian mythological creature that is part lion and part eagle. It's related to the Phoenix, like an animal representing the land and the sky. The Simurgh specifically references the union of land and sky, which feeds into something very formal I was working with in these landscapes. I was working against the idea of the horizon line, a very orienting delineation mainly introduced in European landscape painting. In Chinese landscape painting, you don't have this horizon line because there's a union of all the elements in nature and space, and in these waterfalls, there isn't that definition. It points to an interconnection of matter, energy, and ourselves to the space around us between all the elements pictured here in Simurgh.
The other work They (Nachi), is part of a group of paintings that are a bit older. I was thinking about this idea of environmental personhood, a legal strategy introduced in the 70s. Some indigenous groups use it to help establish the legal rights of natural bodies, like the same rights that an individual and corporations have. I was thinking about how obscene it is in that it relies on the law, first to identify an entity and then be able to protect it, yet the law [often fails to] protect any person or body. I also want to underline the idea that we're related and that natural elements, spaces, and geographies, like mountains, rivers, and waterfalls, [that] everything is a living entity. In titling the work They (Nachi), it acts like a living pronoun. In a couple of these paintings, there are words in parentheses, such as Nachi, which is the waterfall's location in this painting. It is a sacred waterfall in Japan.
Often in these paintings, I travel via the Internet to spaces I have never visited, so I don't have a physical relationship with them. My upbringing is in a city, and I live in an apartment on the second floor, so I don't have access to these natural spaces. There is a longing in my paintings to travel, to be connected to, and to think with these places that are so awesome. They bring me back to natural spaces I have been in, so painting and thinking about this work allows me to access memories of waterfalls I've been to and how powerful and connected I feel to them.
TA:
What are some of the waterfalls that you've been to that have impacted you?
PCH:
Most recently, I spent a lot of time at Vernal and Nevada Falls [in Yosemite]. We went during the pandemic; we were able to get tickets to get into the park. We just spent time hiking to various points on the falls on that trip. You can get close to where the cascade is, which makes such a loud sound, and in other spaces where you're more distant from the falls, the sound of the spray is different. The falls are like a large body, a never-ending, continually transforming body of water.
TA:
Interestingly, you mention it in relation to the body. I just never saw it that way. It brings in this sort of feminist background you're pulling from, yes, no? It is intersectional.
PCH:
Sometimes I think that, but it is there, do you see it?
MRC:
Your discussion of Audre Lorde's erotic resonated with me, and when I looked at Simurgh II, it felt very powerful and alive. I can see its movement and that it is almost majestic and creature-like, unlike very typical landscape painting. I also liked your discussion of the horizon because, for some reason, every time I've looked at this, I wanted to see it upside down. It doesn't have that very centering traditional horizon line that I'm very used to seeing in museums and landscape paintings that grounds you. So, your work makes me feel more about what you're looking at, and it also comes to life. I've never thought much about the human form looking at your work, but I am curious to hear more about that.
PCH:
Yeah, it might be a conceptual scaffolding that I use in the paintings I made around this time that might be more explicit. And I don't want to say that there's a yonic shape, right, which I've been guilty of in the past. But as my thinking has developed, I'm seeing that I may have been participating in feminizing the earth and nature in a way that could feed into its exploitation. There are some arguments in Eco-feminist thought that essentializing nature into the female form doesn't help prevent it from the extractive gaze and practices of patriarchal society. Because of this, it is less appealing for me to make works that could be interpreted that way. But at the same time, this one, They (Nachi), is a bit more figurative.
MRC:
I can see that. We were reading your bio earlier, and you were in a show with Georgia O'Keeffe, and that comes to mind in the way that natural forms reminisce upon the female form. On the one hand, it calls into question what is natural and the beauty of the natural, but on the other hand, how we perceive that beauty and what we do to the things we see and perceive as beautiful.
PCH:
Yeah, I think beauty is an unspoken element [in the work]. I never really speak about the beautiful, but I also know that I sometimes use oversaturated colors that feel artificial or toxic. I use a mechanical process of masking and painting, which is not sensual or expressive, but they are appealing sensibilities. What we'll call beautiful is varied because it's not just pleasing to the eye but probably satisfying. The soul is still waiting for me; they address a particular pattern of grief, especially They (Nachi), from this group of paintings I'm working on. They're all painted on a fluorescent underpainting, and the image is culled from the Internet. I am painting those as if that's what they look like now. And the paintings I've been working on that refer to this glacier that may not look like that any longer, so there is that thread of the space being depicted that is being dissolved by global warming.
TA:
That is the sublime that you reference.
PCH:
Yeah. There is an ecological sublime happening in these works. There's the traditional sublime,
knowing that spaces in the natural world are so large and expansive that they exceed our ability to grasp them and thus cause terror. And then the ecological sublime is equivalent to that, but it's different. It's not so much that the landscape, the mountain range, or the ocean is vast and terrifying. It could be the rate of ecological disaster—the heating up of the world that scares me.
TA:
That's an interesting distinction. I like that. I had a question about the sort of floating droplets of water that seem like spirits. Is that something you were interested in relaying?
PCH:
It's open to that because they become so abstract. They both make sense as some spray is happening, you can imagine that it is happening, but it can also be something else.
TA:
Especially those so colorful and far away from the actual water source.
PCH:
Yeah, they could be many things, and it's been interesting to hear what people see because it's not determined. I know my logic, I thought they were these things, but I don't believe somebody else must perceive them [that way]. They're formally doing something, but what they are representing or what kind of content they bring is definitely not determined.
TA:
One thing about the more recent one, and I don't know if the others in the series are doing this, but compared to Simurgh II, there's so much more division of the landscape. Some levels and layers are made apparent, unlike Simurgh II, where it seems more solid and less permeable. Are you going for that with these more recent works, and is it an intention to show that?
PCH:
Between 2017 and 2022, I believe that making a painting about a landscape changed. It isn't this static thing. I'm bringing in a fraught relationship to landscapes, and even in my position as someone painting these, I'm profoundly questioning [how I am] continuing to be someone making pictures about landscapes. So, in this one, I'm interested in how it's dissolving and the layers of fracture, and how the images are not degraded but incomplete or glitching or something. This has to do with this changing relationship. It could also reflect how our relationship with the landscape is changing. We cannot just consider them a space away from us to be appreciated as a tourist site. Their ability to be enjoyed by other generations is in question. Our waterfalls may be at risk from drought in California, so it may not be possible to continue having these postcard landscape painting cascades.
Because of Daoism, I've always had an abstract relationship with the natural world. In Daoism, it is all interconnected. It is a much more holistic view of your relationship to everything here. In Daoism, things are alive, active, and dynamic, and nothing is still. Transformation and change are the ultimate forces in the world; things are constantly in motion. I have always worked with this in mind, but I have struggled because it's so abstract; it does not apply to daily living.
So, learning about and thinking about my family, as settlers, I try to be mindful of the things I've learned from indigenous scholars and indigenous wisdom to think about your relationship to the entities around you. Thinking about everything as kin makes a lot of sense in understanding how we learn from nature and plants. I don't have a garden, and I don't have a plot of dirt, but I know that when I am with natural elements, the ones that speak to me, reinforce that everything is a living entity.
This detour into Pearl's philosophical and political influences provided the necessary backstory for understanding their intentions. This was especially important to learn as much of Pearl's recent work has tended toward the abstract. What follows is a conversation that focuses on Pearl's process of making works and how this process has changed over the years.
MRC:
I am interested to hear about your relationship with painting, and I think you started out spray painting with aerosol and have moved from that since. I'm interested in your technique. I'm also interested in how you view your works in light of painting as a medium and amongst other works in the show.
PCH:
As an undergrad, I always used oil-based enamel. I was using One-shot paint, which is a sign painter's medium. It comes in a can and is less pricey than tube paint. I came to choose material that wasn't expensive, so I wouldn't buy anything from the art store for a long time. I used a lot of One-shot, and I built my own weird canvases. I [used] found polyester fabric to stretch over them.
When I returned to painting in grad school, I integrated spray painting. Spray painting is also enamel, which means it's self-leveling. I was doing a lot more masking and spraying along with the enamel-poured and applied paint. I used this process to talk about or refer to the visual language of advertisements, pop culture, graphics, music, album art, and different things, everything that wasn't a traditional or European style painting, and I did this for a long time.
I transitioned into acrylic around 2016. The enamel started to be toxic for me because to thin them down to make them behave like watercolor and do all these great things, I would have to use mineral spirits, and even if it was odorless, it was still giving off fumes. So, I have switched away from it, just being worried about future health concerns. I'm still using the masking technique, but I'm using masking frisket film. I am cutting out the shapes and pouring blobs of paint and then using something like a squeegee, a piece of bendable plastic, and I'm dragging the paint. So, there are stages where it's very labor-intensive and controlled work cutting out the masks.
And then this gesture of applying the paint is unpredictable, spontaneous, and more visceral when [I’m] dragging on the paint. When doing that, I think of weeping; it satisfies something emotional. Especially in the big drags and for the piece that will be here in the spring, the large piece, Themses, with extensive paint drags, satisfies something emotional for me.
TA:
It is so amazing to hear you speak about that in relation to your physical body. Making the gestures on the canvas and your emotional side reacting in tandem is quite beautiful.
PCH:
When I used to do more spray painting, the image was more eruptive. I was using spray paint to capture an eruptive force. I painted volcanic eruptions and a few waterfalls, geysers, and blowholes. Those kinds of landscapes [were] helping to express some other sort of emotional release. This happens in painting a lot. There's a kind of control and release. This pattern of control and release lends itself to painting because it is a visceral material—moments where things are very controlled or strained and then bursts of release. You have control and chaos; those kinds of things are great and useful tensions.
MRC:
I have spent many nights painting furiously when I've been distraught. So, I get that.
PCH:
Yeah, and sometimes it can be satisfying to plan, plan, plan, plan, and then do something huge.
MRC:
Yes, it is a very freeing medium. I had no idea you were squeegeeing them, but when I look at They, it does look like screen printing.
PCH:
Yeah, a lot of my techniques mimic printing. Painting and printing have so much in common, especially in forming an image with layers of color. It might be a little out of control because it's so many small shapes that I'm building and then squeegeeing, but it is just so satisfying. There's something nice about dragging paint around.
TA:
So, there is no brushwork?
PCH:
No, not in this one (points to They(Nachi)). Probably beyond the original wash, there is no brush. The brush only if I'm painting watercolor or ink and paper. Something changes when I'm faced with the canvas. I did take calligraphy and brush classes as a kid, so I wonder if this is influence by my upbringing. In a way, Chinese watercolor painting makes much more sense to me than classical or Renaissance-style painting, which doesn't make that much sense to me. Chinese landscape painting and something modern, like a Cezanne, make more sense. Something ancient and modern makes sense to me, but only on paper. When it comes to the canvas stretched out, something gets industrial for me.
TA:
Do you do tests on paper? Or do you paint on paper?
PCH:
I do tests on canvas panels for this kind of stuff because it behaves too differently. I might get a different effect.
TA:
And, outside of these paintings, do you make works on paper?
PCH:
Yeah. These [works on paper] mostly have been landscapes from trips, but some of it is text-based, phrases or words, but they're done differently.
TA:
And are these phrases just coming into your head as you're experiencing the work?
PCH:
No, they're conceptual pinpoints, conceptual map points. They inform the painting or sometimes are oblique to it, but they're [words] that are useful and entirely in practice. So sometimes, they might be something that helps me think about this (points to painting) but doesn't necessarily show this.
One phrase is original face, [the text] looks like it's emerging and submerging into the composition. It's a phrase pulled from a Zen kōan, which is a riddle, or a fable, used for teaching Zen Buddhism lessons, teacher to student. It has many layers, so I've just extracted this one phrase useful to my practice. The riddle is, “what was your original face before your mother and father were born?” I'm paraphrasing because there are different translations, and sometimes it's translated as primal face, but original face is a little more accurate. It points to ideas of non-dualism, so this prompt asks you to think about what you were before your mother and father were born. What were you before this definition, before this separation of self from the world, self from other, figure from ground, or subject/object?
I guess it points me back to either ideas of Daoism, the inseparability of everything, or thinking about a third space, a different space that exceeds dualism. So, it's a conceptual tool to remind me, or to put it into a piece, to understand that these dualities are temporary. They are temporary because they are in this form. And in art, art is about tensions of all these dualisms, working with all these dualisms and trying to create a new space where the gray areas are articulated, or liminality, the margins of duality, because, in dualisms, you can't get anywhere. The world does not exist in the dual. It seemingly exists in dualistic terms, right and left, right and wrong, black and white, but it is much richer.
TA:
So, you were raised with Daoism but now embrace Zen Buddhism?
PCH:
No, I wasn't raised with anything (laughing). Lots of Chinese are automatically kind of
Confucianists and Daoists, and Buddhists. These ideas are [often] mixed and exist in Chinese or Taiwanese culture, also in Korean and Japanese cultures, because there's so much movement [and mixing] in this [region]. Buddhism is from India, and then when it came to China, they used relevant parts and combined them with aspects of Daoism. I only revisited Daoism as an undergrad because I felt very lost. It was beneficial to read when feeling so chaotic at that age. It reminded me that things are constantly in motion, that change is common and normal, and to be flexible.
TA:
That's great. You studied this when you were at UCLA?
PCH:
I just studied on my own. I don't have any formal spiritual practice. I jump in and out of Zen Buddhism, between that and some moon worship, whatever feels right at the time.
TA:
Yeah, I get that. So nice. Well, thank you so much, Pearl.
PCH:
Thank you for the questions.
As our conversation began to wrap up, we wanted to ask one last question about how Pearl felt about their work in relation to the exhibition and the other works in the show. Many insightful thoughts came out of this part of the conversation, and it helped to contextualize the exhibition from the point of view of a participating artist and our visiting painting professor.
TA:
How did you feel about your work in relation to the other works in the show in terms of painting new approaches?
PCH:
It's such a great array of painting, painting approaches, and content. It's exciting to have the work in a room with pieces that I have [some] content or technique in common and converse with so many works that are still very different. It's a celebration of differences, yet there's so much connection. It's such a good show.
TA:
It was enjoyable to put together, and it took all of us.
PCH:
It's impressive because, in some painting shows, you get themes that repeat a little bit or have practices that have much in common. But here, the figurative works are totally different.
MRC:
We were initially planning on centering the show around figuration and new approaches to the body, and I'm quite glad that we didn't because there's so much to draw upon with the variety that we have. And you could relate almost any work here to the body if you wanted to.
TA:
Yeah. And much of this came from asking the artists to invite someone, whatever their practice was. It was a collaborative endeavor that came together. That's what I sensed at the reception with all the artists and what I've heard from people, which is nice. And it's nice to hear what you've said about celebrating differences. That's an excellent way to sum it up. It does do that. Thank you.
PCH:
Yeah. I like that it's new approaches, but it's not really definitive. It's not like there are some trends here. There are so many types of works, materiality, and palettes, so it doesn't close down where painting is going. Yeah, figurative would be broad. The world is full of figurative work. It's always going to be the predominant category.
TA:
And that's what we were pulling together, what is in common with all these artists' works, and
that's where the figurative started coming out. Then we just talked about it, and it became so much more expanded.
PCH:
Yeah, you would run into a lot of certain kinds of challenges. For instance, in the Black American Portraits show at LACMA, they hung hundreds of works to cover the bases. You have several different kinds of figuration here, among other things. You went for a bigger category, which could be too big, but it worked to create such a good balance.
TA:
Well, thank you so much.
PCH:
Thanks for hanging out afterward, Maddie.
At the close of the conversation, Pearl thanks Maddie for hanging around later than intended. It showed the level of interest and engagement that we all experienced throughout this conversation. It was a real gift for us for Pearl to take the time to speak with us. We learned so much more about their work, process, and thoughts than we had ever expected, and we hope that you feel the same way after listening to our conversation.
We want to thank the Art Faculty of Pomona College for allowing us to curate an extensive exhibition with 26 artists and 45 works. We also want to thank all the artists who participated in the Paintings: New Approaches exhibition. I especially wanted to thank the curators, SeoJin Ahn '23, Alex Dean '22, Alicia Garza '22, Austin Kim '24, Maddie Rubin-Charlesworth '23, Aja Trice '24, and Scarlett Wang '22, for dedicating so much time and working through the process of making this exhibition a reality. We all came out of it with a greater awareness of the breadth and depth of how painting and its practices are currently being interpreted and transformed.
This conversation was conducted for educational purposes, as complimentary and additive content to the Painting: New Approaches exhibition presented at the Chan Gallery of Pomona College. This transcription was edited by Tricia Avant and Pearl C. Hsiung and was published on July 28, 2023.
Tricia Avant, Chan Gallery Manager
Contributor's Biographies
Pearl C. Hsiung’s painting, installation, and video works utilize various techniques to investigate the perceptions of our relationship to and within nature as viewed through anthropocentric, sublime, and metaphysical contexts. More recent works challenge the physical and theoretical boundaries between human, nature, and artificial to consider how this entanglement of human/nature/artificial impacts landscapes, how it changes our imagining and imaging of landscape and disrupts our understanding of ecology.
Hsiung received her B.A. from UCLA and MFA from Goldsmiths in London. Hsiung’s exhibitions include solos at Visitor Welcome Center (2019, 2017), Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles (2011), and Steve Turner Contemporary (2010, 2007) in Los Angeles; Max Wigram Gallery, London, (2006, 2004); and Upriver Gallery in Kunming, China (2004). Her work has been included in group exhibits such as The Beyond; Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art (2018-19); New Suns, Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019); Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum; Acclimatation, The Centre National d’art Contemporain, Villa Arson, Nice (2008); California Biennial 2006, Orange County Museum of Art; Busan Biennale 2006, Museum of Modern Art, Busan South Korea; and Expander, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2004). In 2015, She received a CCF Fellowship for Visual Arts, Getty Fellow, Mid-Career Artist grant. Hsiung is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at California State University, Long Beach.
Commissioned by Metro Los Angeles, Pearl C. Hsiung created a large-scale glass mosaic titled High Prismatic. The work was recently installed and is now open to the public at the Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill station in Downtown Los Angeles, CA.
Maddie Rubin-Charlesworth (she/her) recently graduated from Pomona College with a degree in Art and Media Studies. In her time there, she managed the photography darkroom and worked at the Chan Gallery. She took many photographs of the fantastic people she met and painted lots of self-portraits and birds, sometimes on the same canvas. For her senior thesis, Maddie created a domestic installation featuring a bed, self-designed and printed wallpaper, and eight human-shaped soft-sculptures in an exploration of bodily intimacy and exploitation.
Over the course of her college career, Maddie has also worked remotely for a contemporary art gallery in Singapore, sorted rocks for the American Museum of Natural History, and assisted the press office at Tanglewood, a world-renowned classical music festival. Art is one of her top 5 favorite things -- right up there with her relationships, buttered pasta, exploring new places, and vintage clothing -- and she almost always signs off her emails with the word, "cheers."
Tricia Avant has been an artist, arts administrator, curator, educator, and gallery professional over the last 25 years. She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley in the History of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums and non-profit arts spaces in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, and Taipei.
Avant was one of the LA Art Girls, a 30-member collective of women artists in Los Angeles and participated in a series of collaborative performance works and exhibitions with them. She has taught art history and studio art to high school students in West LA and a traditional black and white photography course at California State University, Long Beach; was a Visual Studies Coach at CCA; a Gallery Assistant and Tino Sehgal Interpreter at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco; was Associate Director of Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles; and is currently the Academic Coordinator and Gallery Manager for the Pomona College Art Department and Chan Gallery.
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