That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of that nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and called it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; . . .
William Goyen 1
White stones, one hundred fractured slabs of white unglazed porcelain, float in a grid on the wall at the north front of the gallery. Like the glass curtain wall of the gallery but within the work itself, this 5 x 20 grid of faux stones is a liminal zone, a membrane between exterior and interior. Like the white-painted pickets of a fence demarking the front line of a residential property, it is a surrogate curb separating the private and the public, a cutting of space into the sacred and the profane. 2 As a grid, the porcelain rocks of Reflection reference the grid of the urban landscape, the mathematization and rationalization of space, mapping the localization of terrain to the cosmological, a process older than the Roman coordinates of cardo and decumanus. Rosalind Krauss urges the grid is the quintessential modernist form. 3 Rendering the field isotropic and mensurable by its regularity, the salient aspect of the use of grid structures in artworks and in mapping and in urban planning is its neutralizing effect, at once flattening the spatial field in parallel to the image plane and sitting up structures of ambiguous depth through variation in implied distance by diminution through variations of scale, here of the porcelain stones. Insofar as the grid is an instrumentality of the mensurable, it serves as a trope of reason, and hence of rationality, echoing the function of the grid in Western art since the inception of perspective systems in the Renaissance. 4
The trope of grid as metaphor for order and reason is in counterpoint to the source of the material cause of the work. Deriving from 1,000 pounds of clay body incorrectly formulated so that it lacked the plasticity necessary for throwing or hand building, the material was donated to the artist, who broke the material into rocks with a hammer before firing. The labor of breaking rocks with a hammer is the very figure of hard labor, undertaken for punishment or the facture of artworks. On the south wall within the gallery, Red Field references the rice fields of the artist's native Vietnam, each section of field an element in a grid of fields. Two large red panels form a diptych on the south wall. Porcelain rice grains attached to thin steel wires vibrate above their surface, stirred by the artificial breeze of the air conditioning, or by the air currents set in motion by the perturbation of the passing viewer.
A cloud of white diaphanous fabric extends below the level of the track lights from the east wall of the gallery to the west wall, falling down the west wall to a pile on the floor. Beyond this stretch of fabric, a shroud of the same chiffon sweeps downward in an arc from the east wall, across an empty red table juxtaposed to a white table covered with shards of fired porcelain, and then arcs upward to the top of the west wall; like the first swath of fabric, it falls down the west wall into a gathered pile on the floor. Source Script engages life and death, the tables referencing the use of table as bed, as the site of meals, and as mortuary slab. The porcelain shards, fragments of a collapse sculpture by another artist and recycled, are a synecdoche for the circle of life, emerging from and returning to not-being.
Meditation occupies the niche-like space of the gallery at the west of the glass curtain wall. A nestled set of twenty six porcelain hands, ascending in diminishing scale, floats off the wall above five leaves held off the wall by headed pins; a twig with two leaves at the end of the Y-shaped branch-like the conventional iconology of Saint Lucy 5 with her eyes held on a Y-shaped branch of severed tissue-surmounts the ascending nestled hands. Formed by the reiterative slip casting of porcelain into molds initially made from the artist's hands, the successive casts shrink in firing. The progressive diminution of scale of the hands in each iteration becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of the body into space.
Though within the space of the gallery rather than the landscape, Du Chau's installation Home is a "site-adjusted" 6 work, a
work [that] compensates for the modern development of the levels of meaning-content having been reduced to terrestrial dimensions (even abstraction). Here consideration is given to adjustments of scale, appropriateness, placement, etc. But the "work of art" is still either made or conceived in the studio and transported to, or assembled on, the site. 7
Thus the work here. Divisible into four discrete units "made or conceived in the studio," the work nevertheless subsists as a whole as an installation.
Silence surrounds the work. Or, the work is embedded in silence. Silence sets the work apart from the lifework, in which it is embedded, and on which it conduces to meditation.
| Red Field | paint/canvas, steel wire, porcelain | 2, each 67.5 x 78 x 4 inches |
| Source Script | wood, porcelain, chiffon, paint | 12 x 45 x 4 feet |
| porcelain, leaves | 32 x 23 x 3 inches | |
| Reflection | porcelain | 64 x 363 x 5 inches |