Red Beans and Rice: Asian Artists in the New South opening at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, September 10 and running through October 29, 2005.  The show’s next stop will be at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC.

The show is curated by independent curators Craig Bunting and Kóan Jeff Baysa.  See below, and the Contemporary’s website – www.thecontemporary.org, for more information on the show.

Contact Craig Bunting for information on securing the show for exhibition.

Red Beans and Rice: Asian Artists in the New South

Curated by Kóan-Jeff Baysa and Craig Bunting

Patrons’ and Press preview in conjunction with Asian Studies at Emory

(by invitation) – Friday, September 9, 5 - 7 pm

Artists’ reception - Saturday, September 10, 7 - 9 pm

ARTISTS OF ASIAN DESCENT COMMENT ON THE SOUTHERN EXPERIENCE IN RED BEANS AND RICE: ASIAN ARTISTS IN THE NEW SOUTH AT ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, SEPTEMBER 10 – OCTOBER 29, 2005.

The American South has struggled with the ideals of equality throughout its controversial history.  The Civil Rights era and desegregation of the 1960’s began the era of the “New South”.  Yet even today there are pockets of resistance, places where even though the law says that all people are equal, some are more equal than others.

Red Beans and Rice brings together an under-recognized group of artists profoundly influenced by their experiences in the Southern states.  The exhibition dissects themes including cultural engagement, dual citizenship, Christian, American, and Asian ideals and stereotypes.  Some of these artists were born in the South and have deep roots in the region.  For others it has become their home through adoption and absorption, but their sentiments about the South are often in conflict with the traditions and cultures they grew up with.  As the process of Americanization begins, these artists reexamine, redefine, and integrate a new vision of home.  For many, the longing for distant homelands might never pass, with fantasies of home distorted through the processes of memory and myth making.

Confirmed artists are of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Philippine, and Taiwanese descent; they are: ON/Megumi Akiyoshi, Yun Bai, Yin Kit Chan, J. Jaia Chen, Arthur Liou, Kazuko Matsumoto, Jiha Moon, Osamu James Nakagawa, Lordy Rodriguez, Prince Varaghese Thomas, Edie Tsong, Jan-Ru Wan, and Bo Zhang

ON/Megumi Akiyoshi has visited the American South a number of times and found strong associations with the culture Okinawa, the southern island in Japan... in food, position, and feelings for the country they belong to.  Her new piece entitled "Southern Bell & Okinawan Princess" consists of two dolls, in the form of stand-ups with faces cutout, representing the most ornate dress in the southern US and South of Japan.  By peeking through the cutouts, viewers participate in the illusion of “wearing the dress”.

The installation by Yun Bai will consist entirely of ping pong balls jointed together to create “cellnoids”. A cellnoid is a representation of a living thing -- bug-like, with tentacles, they stand alone. Just like people and other living things, cellnoids exist independently, and also congregate in groups. The three cellnoid sculptures will be grouped together, as if they were interacting with one another, just as humans in society do. 

J. Jaia Chen’s work has always focused strongly on a sense of place. She utilizes sculpture, performance, video, installation, and conceptual art forms to examine the emerging space of the outsider. Her work is centered on the notion of looking at a Chinese landscape through an unfamiliar eye.  Wonderworld is an imaginary landscape from an imaginary world.  “I am trying to delineate the gap between an abstract representation and reality.  Within that space is where Wonderworld exists, where one feels amazed, yet peculiar.”

Ying Kit Chan depicts exposed machinery of old factories and other, less overt, symbols of the industrial world in transition like telephone poles and electric wires. He manipulates these records on computer, transposing them into layered visual pages which alter time by reducing imagery to twilight.  The most powerful transposition is from traditional Chinese calligraphy to mundane shapes, where markings appear descriptive, but in reality they are more akin to the energy of writing itself. Marks have the force of speech, and tensions between graphic energies and objects become oracular.

The video and video still from Things that are Edible by Taiwanese artist Arthur Liou are his homage to the intimate experience of sitting down to a good meal.  He characterizes this work as ‘the peace of eating to entertain our soul’.  However, this video also addresses larger issues of poverty and humility by underscoring the way food changes cultures as it becomes more readily available, and the reality that more is always expected.

Jiha Moon is a young Korean artist living and working in Virginia. She has lived in United States for five years with her American husband and shows frequently in Korea, Europe and the United States. Her new work is large ink and acrylic paintings on paper. Works like "Tangled" and "Kite" offer the viewer the poetic and energetic abstract imagery of traditional Asian watercolor painting and western Field Painting.

Japanese artist Kazuko Matsumoto represents the seemingly limitless land of America with the horizontal line and represents Christianity with the vertical line.  By applying this minimalism, she defines a relationship between God and people that she had not experienced in Japan.  With natural fiber and branches from the Kentucky countryside, she creates installations hanging from the ceiling, creating a room of rain, a transcendent space where the viewer interacts with the absent artist. 

Japanese-American artist Osamu James Nakagawa’s photographic Drive-In Theater Series hauntingly superimposes images of a Ku Klux Klan rally onto a drive-in movie screen on a field in the Texan landscape.  In the same series, Nakagawa places a theater screen within a ravaged landscape of abandoned debris, featuring two Godzillas terrorizing a trailer.

Lordy Rodriguez was born in the Philippines and raised in Texas and Louisiana. He studied art while living with a Vietnamese family in New York, and currently resides in Los Angeles.  This peripatetic lifestyle is mirrored in his meticulous drawings that chart imprecise geographies fusing location and desire. Homesick for Texas in New York, he literally drew them juxtaposed; in Texas, longing for friends in Connecticut, he mapped those States closer.  Cartography is codified abstraction, a way to control and govern physical elements that began with conjecture and imagination and eventually became a science.  Rodriguez flips that science back into art and fashions a world legible through the veil of his own code.

The photo-based giclée prints of Prince Varughese Thomas, an Indian Asian American, are influenced by pharmaceutical media campaigns promoting prescription drugs that allow for various cosmetic treatments. Thomas questions how science and technology are implicated in perpetuating culturally encoded myths about ideal physical forms. “It is my intention that this work operates as a critique of our cultural selves.”

Beauty contests have long been considered a tradition of Southern culture.  In the video Endless Stream Miss America Edie Tsong parades in public wearing a white platinum wig and Miss America sash, waving to passersby.  For some this gesture demonstrates a palpable and unsettling arrogance, for others an example of self-conscious American humor.

Jan-Ru Wan, a Taiwanese artist living in North Carolina, creates installations exploring travel across seas, harmony and struggle, the finite and the eternal, with an underlying theme that “We are all in the same boat”.  A “wave” of silk organza hangs symmetrically while dozens of red folded boats float below.  Many of the boats interact through magnetism and simulate a nervous system, evoking contemplation on external and internal dualisms, the body contained and the body projected.

Bo Zhang’s current sculptures and installations address the biological potency of keratin, a protein based substance forming the principle of matter of hair, nails, hooves etc. To present the transparent, allusive and ambiguous nature of keratin she has worked primarily with fiberglass resin. The specifics of the material allow her to work intuitively, exploring a world that exists beyond preconceptions. Keratin acts as a powerful metaphor revealing an ambiguity where elements such as fingernails and hair evoke adjoined sensations of growth, power, danger and beauty. Coming from an Eastern (Chinese) heritage, these simultaneously feminine and masculine sculptures contrast the significance of this theme in Eastern and Western cultural traditions.

Co-curator Kóan-Jeff Baysa is an independent curator, writer, specialist physician and alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Curatorial Studies. His writing appears in gallery and museum catalogues, art periodicals, Web site journals and medical science publications. Lecture venues include Montclair State University, ISCP, ArtOMI, Parsons Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design New York Studio Program in addition to graduate architecture critiques at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

Co-curator Craig Bunting is an independent curator and visual artist based in Louisville, Kentucky.  He has curated such exhibitions as “Earth and memory”, 2005 and “Weather Report, Artists Living with HIV and AIDS”, 2003.  He attended New York University and was the recipient of a Goethe Institute Scholarship which resulted in study in Boppard, Germany.

Founded in 1973, the Contemporary is a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to excellence, experimentation and education in all forms of contemporary art.  Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 535 Means Street, NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30318, phone (404) 688-1970, www.thecontemporary.org.

###