Gifts. Acrylic 30”x40”. The only painting I made in 2017 🤟
A playful riff on Chinese cultural symbols. “Gifts” conveys endowments, inheritances, blessings - as well as the throw-away, souvenir quality of visual clichés. There’s the familiar Chinatown iconography of kitschy opulence, the urban legends of New-Money excess from the 00s onwards, the sheen of cheap, oriental materialism that coats every watered-down, abridged-for-America cultural rite. But I still remember Harbin in the 90s: the residual socialism, the nationalist rhetoric, the values of humility, courage, and self-sacrifice that pervaded pre-K education. There’s a tougher core within Chinese heritage, one that’s always been more about suffering than about fortune cookies, yet also one that my family left behind in search of greener pastures and easier Californian living. All of these disparate elements hover just above consciousness when I think about where I’m from and who I am; removed by time and space, however, Chinese-ness dilutes into a superficial identity that I can hold up to look at, as if it were a postcard from someone else’s past. And that’s really what my painting is, I guess.
Heavily borrows from the illustrative style of 70s-90s Chinese propaganda posters, which fittingly mimic aesthetics of pre-revolution printed advertisements. Flowers might be the ultimate bourgeois symbol.
We stand in solidarity with the people of Daechuri and Doduri, South Korea who are protecting their homes, land, and livelihood from the U.S. military. We believe that the U.S. military must cease and desist its forced eviction of Pyeongtaek farmers. We demand that the governments of South Korea and the U.S. review and re-negotiate the planned expansion of the U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek.
The South Korean government should immediately withdraw all military troops from Daechuri and Doduri, allow the villagers to enter their fields, and retract its plan for the destruction of houses and villages. The government must also make a public apology to the public for committing violence against its people and immediately release all prisoners. In addition, the South Korean government should reverse its agreement to the U.S. military “strategic flexibility” plan, of which the Pyeongtaek base expansion is a result. This shift toward “strategic flexibility” in U.S. military policy will only strengthen U.S. imperial ambitions in East Asia and threaten to unleash a crisis of war in the region.
The forcible displacement of Pyeongtaek farmers violates the housing rights specified in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Culture Rights, and the freedoms of body, of residence and transfer, of expression and of association as specified in the International Covenant on Civil and Politic Rights. The Korean government is party to both of these agreements. Already hundreds of people have been injured by South Korean riot police and hired thugs, simply for protecting themselves and their land from the impending social, cultural, economic, and environmental destruction caused by yet another U.S. military base.
they razed these people’s homes and farmlands so they can build a water park, funded largely in part by the south korean government for which they exploit using trade negotiations for funding :)))))
