Foreign Born
February 28 – April 5, 2020
Featuring works from Taiko Chandler, Dianna Frid, Hung Lui, Ana Maria Hernando, Danqi Cai, Eriko Tsogo, and Roberta Restaino.
Foreign Born explores the unique perspectives of female immigrants from Asia, South America and Europe. Individually, each artist charted a unique path to citizenship, while collectively that path ultimately inspired a desire for artistic expression. By referencing birth, femininity, and cultural identity, their unique perspectives form a singular message around the significance of immigration and the power of the female viewpoint.
Aligned with Mo’Print, a celebration of printmaking created “to inspire, educate, and promote awareness throughout Colorado” (Mo’Print Home Page, 2020), this exhibition predominantly features printmaking in the form of lithographs, monoprints, and etchings, but also includes drawings and paintings for a diverse range of represented media.
It is within the creation of ‘prints’ that we observe intrinsic personal narratives. From artists that directly reference their home country, artists depicting figures of another time and location, or artists that abstractly depict their connection to a new environment, Foreign Born delivers a diverse collection of work from artists creating personal objects in a once unfamiliar locale: the United States of America.
About The Artists
TAIKO CHANDLER
BIO
Taiko Chandler lives and works in Denver, CO. She was born and raised in Nagano, Japan, and was originally trained as a nurse. Today, she works primarily in printmaking and, more recently, site-specific installation art. Her work has been exhibited in Colorado (most recently a solo show at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art), Texas, and New Mexico, as well as at numerous print fairs throughout the U.S. Her work is in private and public collections in Japan and the U.S., including the Cleveland Clinic Art Program, the University of Colorado Denver Business School, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (NY), and Denver Art Museum (Education Collection).
Interplay
Printmaking is my primary professional art medium where I am driven to develop my own vocabulary. I am drawn, in particular, to its unpredictability. I compose my work instinctively, combining shapes, colors, lines, and textures in order to express my imagination and react to the environment around me. The process is, therefore, both deliberate and iterative. I am constantly improvising with no fixed destination in my mind. As I work, the evolution of the work stretches the starting point – it is the open nature of the process that is constantly creating new possibilities.
In addition to printmaking, I am interested in three dimensional work. Here, I am particularly drawn to site specific installation art that is, by definition, inspired by the space and immediate surroundings. I am fascinated by the dynamism of 3D art that allows for a more intimate interaction with those who come to view the work. Also, I love the transient nature of installations, which last for the length of a show and are then dismantled. When (and if) they are assembled again, the pieces always come together to create something new that is, in turn, inspired by its own particular space.
For these installations, my selection of materials (e.g., Tyvek, fabric, paper fasteners, etc) reflects my interest in using simple materials that I can manipulate and, therefore, transform. With my Tyvek installations, I draw on the positive space by shaping the material, but seek to
emphasize the negative space by cutting the non-printed areas. I am constantly fascinated by the power of this work to redefine the spaces in which they appear.
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Visit Taiko Chandler’s Website:
ERIN HYUNHEE KANG
BIO
Erin Kang is a painter, a graphic designer and an illustrator based in Boulder. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Erin moved to the states at age of fifteen. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art. Currently, Erin works as a freelance designer for Penguin Random House. She is also actively developing her personal body of fine art works as one of seven artists in the Boulder Creative Collective artist-in-residence program where she works with collaged images as preliminary sketches for larger body of paintings.
Sanctuary
My interest arise from the subtle connections and boundaries between different phases of my life. I translate these delicate boundaries of subconscious into surreal landscapes using various representations of water. Not only these landscapes result in both serene and catastrophic outcomes, but also what is manipulating and manipulated becomes
obscure. By exploring these unpredictable results, I hope to find clarification and acceptance from the past.
Visit Erin Hyunhee Kang’s Website:
DIANNA FRID
BIO
Dianna Frid is an artist working at the intersection of material texts and textile. Her artist’s books and mixed-media works make visible the material manifestations of language. In her work, embroidery is a prominent vehicle for exploring the relationships between writing and drawing; and between transcription and legibility. Frid was born in Mexico where she was first exposed to textiles as complex codes of material writing. This point of reference helps her situate her work alongside lineages that embrace longstanding connections between art and needlework, and between idea and substance. Her process is slow; it is a portal for contemplating themes of time, death, and the transformation of matter.
Shark’s Ink Collection: Sieve
High contrast photographs of sieve-like objects are the inception of this series. Each print is a particular response to a fragment of a photographic image. Although each work seems to be abstract, it is only partially so since it includes both the cropped index of an object in the world, and a simultaneous nonrepresentational rejoinder to it. The rejoinder embodies an ongoing dialogue with Bud Shark. As collaborators, we figure out what to make by figuring out how to make it. The Sieve series pivots around the concept of process as a way through an aesthetic possibility something that did not exist before we started. We invent the problem so that we may play with and open it up. Our work together is not concerned with merely finding solutions, but with ways of seeing that arise through making.
Shark’s Ink Collection: On the Modification of Clouds (after L.H.)
L.H. refers to Luke Howard who was the scientist who first classified the clouds in 1802. The Latin names in his nomenclatures (Cirrus, Cumulus, Nimbus, etc.) are still the names we use today. His research was published in a report titled, “On the Modification of Clouds,” and I appreciatively borrowed it for the titling of these lithographs. Atmospheric conditions and elevations set the conditions for one type of cloud to the potentially morph into another type. The attitudes of shifts and modifications–as indicated by the title of the suite–was one of the operating principles in making the lithographs at Shark’s Ink.
Visit Dianna Frid’s Website:
HUNG LIU
BIO
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. Initially trained in the Socialist Realist style, Liu studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before immigrating to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of Happenings. A two time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Liu also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking from the Southern Graphics Council International in 2011. A retrospective of Liu’s work, “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu,” was recently organized by the Oakland Museum of California, and is scheduled to tour nationally through 2015. In a review of that show, the Wall Street Journal called Liu “the greatest Chinese painter in the US.” Liu’s works have been exhibited extensively and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Liu currently lives in Oakland, California. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she has taught since 1990.
Shark’s Ink Collection: Official Portraits
In the past Liu has used anonymous historical photographs as the subject matter of her prints and paintings. In the suite she present three self portraits, each denoting an important period of her life. “Proletarian” shows a young Liu at the time of the Cultural Revolution, working in the countryside. “Immigrant” is based on a photograph from the time of her immigration to the US. “Citizen” is a recent self-portrait as a confident and mature woman of the world. She embellishes the images with lovely drawings of plants, flowers, birds, rats (her Chinese zodiac sign) and painterly drips and circles. Collaged on each print are representations of the ID cards, permits and ration coupons that have documented her “official” status associated with these portraits.
Shark’s Ink Collection: The Last Dynasty
Hung Liu’s lithographs, The Last Dynasty: Countess and The Last Dynasty: Empress, continue the exploration of the history of her homeland through found anonymous photographs. Using black and white images from the Qing Dynasty, Liu has re-drawn the images with painterly washes and colors. Liu describes her approach to the found images, “…between dissolving and preserving is the rich middle-ground where the meaning of an image is found…My prints are metaphors for memory and history…”
Visit Hung Lui’s Website:
DANQI CAI
BIO
Danqi Cai was born in Nanchang, China in 1996 and raised in Shenzhen, China. She graduated BFA summa cum laude from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2019, where she double majored in Printmaking & Humanistic Studies and concentrated in Graphic Design and Book Arts. Danqi has shown widely in regional, national and international juried exhibitions. In 2018, she participated in the Salt City Dozen portfolio exchange, won first and third places in the lithography category of New Impressions Printmaking Competition, received Best in Show from Four Rivers Print Biennial, and gave an artist talk at International Print Center New York (IPCNY)’s Multilayered: New Prints 2018/Summer. In 2019, she was awarded a fully-funded residency at Chautauqua School of Art, received a full scholarship to attend Penland School of Crafts, and received the Muskat Studios Prize from The Boston Printmakers 2019 North American Print Biennial. She is currently the 2019–2020 Printmaking Resident at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.
She Loves Control: Prints and Reproductive Autonomy
This exhibition is a group of lithographs responding to China’s changing population control policies and their effects on women. Borne out of China’s one-child policy and its deep-rooted gender inequality, my family history fueled my obsession with the question of reproduction. My father had always wanted a son, so eleven years ago my mother agreed to adopt a baby boy, only for my father to leave us shortly thereafter. A teenager at the time, I struggled to understand my father’s desire for a son, his subsequent abandonment of us, and my mother’s unquestioning commitment to child-rearing.
A woman’s life seems to be valued differently depending on what stage it is in. Both social commentary and self-portrait, my prints reflect on this observation using, for example, both my adult body and my one- year-old portrait in “AHHHH”. One Hundred (Would Be) Daughters, for instance, comments on the gender imbalance in China and explores the irony of people not wanting daughters yet desperately needing mothers for the next generation.
The connection between printmaking and biological reproduction is also central to this project, with the printing matrix (the Latin word for “womb”) as the metaphorical womb. Moreover, Mandarin Chinese makes no distinction between “biological reproduction ” and “mechanical reproduction.” Biologically, our lives begin through the replication of cells, just as a generative matrix begets multiplicity. Likewise, the printmaking practice of layering results in “sibling” prints that share a parent matrix, and yet each contains distinct mutations.
Visit Danqu Cai’s Website :
ERIKO TSOGO
BIO
Eriko Tsogo is a Mongolian American cross-disciplinary artist, art management professional, civic engagement project developer, immigrant and women’s rights activist, and DACA recipient born on the steppes of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She is an alumni of Denver School of the Arts, having attained her B.F.A (2012) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University. She is based in Denver and mindscape Mongolia but lives bi-coastally in the US. Eriko is represented by Tappan Collective agency in Los Angeles.
WRONG WOMEN, Myths from the Sky
WRONG WOMEN, Myths from Sky series chronicles the metaphysical pilgrimage of the marginal heroine as they travel through the kaleidoscopic labyrinth of time, space and nature. On journey, they must learn to navigate and overcome perpetual opposition and adversity, worldly obstacles exemplified through various conceptualized physical bodily trials, in order to find themselves. The artworks act as part biographical exposé, addressing the universal struggles and inner spectrum of the non-binary identity. Wrong Women seeks to help transform the viewer through the power of empathy, inspiration, and empowerment.
Visit Eriko Tsogo’s Wesite:
ANA MARIA HERNANDO
BIO
Ana María Hernando, from Argentina and based in Colorado for the last twenty-three years, is a multidisciplinary artist, with a passion for calling forward lightness in us. She is interested in empathy, in making the invisible visible, and in the transformative, compassionate conversation of the universe. She considers the balance between the material and the transcendent, devotedly exploring the sacred feminine through women’s rich histories, their daily lives and relationship to hand-worked textiles and wares. In her installations, Ana includes the work of women from around Latin America, from embroideries of cloistered nuns in Buenos Aires, to the weavings and wares of Peruvian women from the mountains.
Shark’s Ink Collection: Las Aberturas, Los Organos que Esperan
Shark’s Ink Collection: Night Flower I & II
The two prints, “Night Flowers I & II” are related to my latest body of work, where I have been exploring the night, looking for light in the darkness, and looking for darkness in all. In the night the ends an the beginnings are one, everything melts into the obscure, and it all becomes and intimate immensity. The outside becomes the inside, and the inside becomes the outside. What is far and open embraces us, pulls us closer. In the night the moon and the stars bathe us in their white fire, caressing us softly, revealing the nocturnal voices,
transforming our orange song.
Shark’s Ink Collection: Somos Aire (We Are Air)
I have been painting enormous flowers, flowers that cannot be contained by the paper. Somos Nube (We are Cloud) [not on display] and Somos Aire (We are Air) profess a grand beauty I am seeing everywhere. The persistent feminine force cannot be denied any longer. Why are we so afraid of the presence of the feminine? It is unstoppable. Flowers, in their quiet but urgent power, are our most trustworthy prophets.
Visit Ana Mario Hernando’s Website:
ROBERTA RESTAINO
BIO
Roberta Restaino is originally from Italy. She earned a BFA in Visual Arts and Design at the Academy of Fine Arts (Accademia di Belle Arti) in Rome and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Colorado Boulder where she taught Printmaking and Foundations. In Italy and Europe, she worked in Art Museums, at colleges teaching set design and creative workshops. She was a Deputy Director of creative events – Officine Creative. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Greenville Technical College and a member of Contemporary Print Collective.
Restaino’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows in Italy, England, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria, Bosnia & Herzegovina, South Korea, Africa, and the United States, and is part of permanent collections of UNESCO in Vicenza, Italy, Stara Zagora Art Gallery in Bulgaria, Zuckerman Museum of Art in Georgia, SGC International Archives, Centro de Arte Faro Cabo Mayor in Spain, among other public and private collections.
Interchangeable Camouflage
Interchangeable Camouflage is a personal inquiry of my identity as an immigrant from Italy living in the USA. The second body of work is How Far We are? It is a question thinking about how new technologies -alien elements- interfere and interconnect with our life. It relates to my personal story to feel foreign to this land.
I really understood what it was to be Italian when I moved to America. I have experienced the cross cultures through mature eyes that are always seeking answers through logical connections. I became more aware of words and their meanings and witnessed how cultures overlap. It is quite exciting and scary at the same time, but interesting for sure.
The more time I spend outside my familiar environment, the more I recall old memories that I reveal in my work. Rome influences, informs, and translates into my work as textures, layers, patterns, and marks accumulating through history, left by time over time. Underneath Rome and its surroundings, where I grew up, there is an infinite amount of ruins to reveal. It aligns perfectly with my obsession with scientific discovery and a sense of wonder that leads me to my process of making. How Far We are? It is a question thinking about how new technologies -alien elements- interfere and interconnect with our life. It resonates with my personal story to feel foreign to this land and paradoxically on my land.
In my daily experience, I constantly stop to decipher words and their meanings to express myself in a different language. Inevitably, in every daily conversation, I experience this because I have a trademark that is my accent. Suddenly, when people notice it and tell you, it brings you into a question of belonging. That is the scared part that I mentioned above, wherein these moments, you feel a sense of detachment from both cultures, the one that I am embracing as a foreigner and my own; moments where you do not know where you belong anymore. When I go back to my country, I experience what I call “reverse culture shock” that is a feeling of disconnection with your own environment and people. I think it happens to anyone who lives far away from their own country for a long time.
Interchangeable Camouflage comes from the idea that we move, change, reshaping ourselves, always in search of something. I like the idea that even though this piece has multiples of the same matrix, it will never be the same when installed on another wall. It will change, interchange within itself, to represent a new me in another stage of growth and awareness.
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Visit Roberta Restaino’s Website: