Rene Yung: Cauldron

Bay Area artist Rene Yung was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to California with her family as an adolescent. She has lived in the United States for the past 33 years. Her installations explore the “in-betweenness” of feeling neither Chinese, American, nor Asian-American.

In this drawing-based installation, Yung explores the need for sustenance and sacrament in daily life.

In a process of devotional invocation, a bowl of rice—the traditional Chinese symbol for sustenance and livelihood—is drawn again and again, each drawing successively larger, reaching a wall-sized scale. Counter-balancing the rice bowls are drawings of the Euro-American staple, the potato—a Western symbol of sustenance and a metaphor for diasporic survival. The drawings are installed on walls painted with a Confucian text for right living, and with blue and white patterning based on Chinoiserie porcelain.

“Cauldron” uses heterophony—the practice in Asian music of different instruments playing the same song in unison, with the idiomatic variations of each instrument creating a dense, complicated whole—to express the complexity of the concept of sustenance.

* Related Programming:

Tuesday 18 May, 6 pm: Hosfelt Gallery will present a dialogue between Rene Yung, writer and critic Reena Jana, and expert in contemporary Chinese art Craig Yu. The “Inside/Out: New Chinese Art” exhibition has drawn attention to issues explored by Chinese artists—either the “exotic” off-shore Asian or the recent immigrant. Yung, Jana, and Yu will discuss the perspective of Asians who have been in the U.S. a long time, but who are still not part of the American-born Asian (i.e. Asian-American) experience.