May 1- November 6,
Chunming Yu’s painting of extended family homes and villages (to the right) and Rene Yung’s detailed drawings of fruit stones (to the left) intimately describe home culture as life force. Both sets of images depict tightly nested worlds: Yu paints traditional homes studied on extensive travels throughout his homeland, China; Yung’s highly detailed fruit “stones,” or “pits” allude to their complexity as both a record of the past and the origin of new life: portable worlds. As Americans who were born in China and Hong Kong, Yu and Yung chronicle their hybrid experience of home as protective landscapes that enclose the past and move to seed the future.
Rene Yung says: “I am one of the seeds scattered, and I have encountered so many others, day after day – in the market, on the street, at the airport. in some anonymous lobby, in a school-room, an elevator. there is a moment of recognition, eyes meet fleetingly, or not at all; the skin breathes in signals of the kindred. we are called americans. we came from different places, for different reasons, to be in this country. we leave behind habits, languages, ways of holding our bodies, families, friends, foods, market smells, traffic patterns, birds and their songs, vegetation, dust, mountains, rivers… in america we talk/walk/eat/dress american, to varying degrees of attendance. beneath the skin, in the blood stream, what had been left behind mingles with what is encountered day to day, in a constantly-shifting mix where seeing and being are porous, kaleidoscopic. it is an impossible task, to wear another’s skin. to see through the other’s eyes, to know what it feels like to be seen that way. the only thing for certain is that we all see differently.
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