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ART REVIEWS

Hwa Young Caruso, Ed. D. & John Caruso, Jr., Ph. D. 
Art Review Editors

YANKEE REMIX AT MASS MoCA

Introduction
Huang Yong Ping
Rina Banerjee

Introduction

The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is located in North Adams, a small city (pop. 15,000), in northwest Massachusetts that is a three-hour drive from New York City or Boston.  The museum is located in a former mill complex, built in the 1860’s.  During the American Civil War (1861-65), the mill housed a textile company, the Arnold Print Works, until 1931; the Sprague Electric Company occupied the complex with more than 4,000 employees until 1985.  Now that the museum is in place, the main factory with twenty-five adjoining buildings remains economically associated with this former New England mill town for over one hundred and forty years.  [paragraph 1]

Mass MoCA has undergone continuous renovation since it was established in 1989.  After ten years of planning, fund raising, and architectural renovations, the museum was opened to the public in 1999.  Mass MoCA retained its original red brick industrial appearance while converting the production and storage areas into large display areas and large- and small-scale display areas.  The ground-level entrance welcomes visitors into the setting of a 19^th-century mill.  A warm and approachable appearance gently introduces viewers to the world of large-scale, sophisticated contemporary artworks created by artists invited from different countries.  [paragraph 2]

The major exhibition from May 2003 – May 2004, entitled Yankee Remix, represented newly commissioned artworks by nine international artists:  Rina Banerjee, Ann Hamilton, Martin Kersels, Zoe Leohard, Annette Messager, Manfred Pernice, Huang Yong Ping, Lorna Simpson and Frano Violich.  This exhibition was a collaborative project between Mass MoCA and Boston-based Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA).  Artists were free to select antiques, historical artifacts and archival documents from the SPNEA collection and adapt, incorporate, interpret, and infuse them into their installation artworks.  Three-way collaboration among Mass MoCA, culturally diverse artists, and SPNEA is an innovative project.  It is an excellent example of a successful collaboration between something old and new, which adds another dimension to the art-making and meaning-making process.  [paragraph 3]

Several of the nine invited artists made eclectic and symbiotic cultural, historical, and aesthetic statements that reflected transnational journeys from their homelands, such as China, India, and Germany, to the adopted country.  By inviting artists from outside New England, Mass MoCA’s curator, Laura Heon, intended to represent a broad spectrum of artistic approaches and geographic and cultural diversity.  The cultural backgrounds of the nine artists differ as much as their life experiences.  In the process of selecting and incorporating New England antiques, artifacts, and archival documents these artists dialectically gave new meanings and personal interpretations to the objects by combining them with their individual experiences, artistic visions, and cultural statements.  Their geographically diverse origins and hybrid identities influenced their interpretation of New England's historical objects in an intimate and personal way.  Among the nine artists, Huang Yong Ping and Rina Banerjee integrated multicultural concepts and issues of cultural and ethnic identity.  The artworks of these two artists explore transnational and transcultural experiences in their unique ways. [paragraph 4]

Huang Yong Ping

Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping created the installation entitled “Dragon Boat.”  He was born in Fujian Province, China in 1954.  In 1989 he began to work in France and currently resides in Paris.  His “Dragon Boat” is a large striking piece with magnetic power that immediately greets and forcefully grips viewers.  This interactive Dragon Boat invites visitors to join an imaginary trip sailing across a vast ocean with hopes and dreams for a better life in the land of endless opportunities.  Perhaps the journey could be a sentimental return to their homelands and their cultural roots to embrace deeply ingrained memories.   This large interactive installation invites viewers to walk on board and stimulates their curiosity to investigate the exhibited trunks and suitcases of those who made the journey.  Huang’s installation may touch some viewers personally by stirring their memories as immigrants who had moved from different countries.  Huang’s transcultural identity and his personal experiences as an expatriate are deeply embedded in his choice of subjects, objects, and the installation arrangement. [paragraph 5]

Huang’s Dragon Boat was inspired by a 30-inch-long Chinese bronze incense burner, a 19th-century antique borrowed from SPNEA, which is on display in Mass MoCa.  A mythical dragon represents and symbolizes imperial power, happiness, immortality, fertility, and happiness in the Chinese zodiac.  Huang incorporated other mystic and symbolic animal themes such as dragons, deer and fish in his earlier works.  These animal images are revered and appear frequently in the cultural motifs and artworks of China and other Asian nations.  Huang successfully unified his Chinese cultural heritage with the language of contemporary art and historical artifacts in the Dragon Boat.  Suspended over the front of the dragon’s head is a translucent illuminated soccer-ball-sized glass globe, in which a map is inscribed.  This global map represents the journey of boats, passengers, crew members and immigrants that sail together around the world.  The illuminated globe serves as a guiding beacon to the immigrants who boarded dragon boats to sail north, east, or south carrying their culture all over the world. [paragraph 6]

Huang’s monumental Dragon Boat offers a tactile experience tempting the viewers to touch the external skin made of rice paper.  By affixing translucent rice paper to the exterior of the boat’s wooden frame, the artist creates a feeling of lightness within the large heavy boat.  The warm natural-colored rice paper is in major contrast to the striking scale of the Dragon Boat.  The boat is filled with battered trunks and Victorian-era suitcases, which reminds us of the history of immigration in this country and evokes a moment of reflection.  On the side of the boat Huang placed various objects such as old straw brooms, wooden patterns of pants and stockings, walking canes, swords, and crutches that represent the multiple legs of a dragon. These objects symbolize obstacles that immigrants had to overcome during the journey and struggles that they experienced in a strange land.  These antique objects signify the pain and difficulties of their lives.  Despite the uncertainty of the journey, this gentle giant boat may carry the hopes and dreams of the viewers, the artist, and the immigrants on their way to a new land of opportunity or to home.  Huang, an expatriate who lives in Paris, expresses his journey on the Dragon Boat as an act of displacement combined with a nostalgic desire to reconnect to his heartland China through the art-making process.  This art making and meaning making of an imaginary journey on a mythical dragon boat is part of his renegotiation with the identity as a Chinese expatriate. [paragraph 7]

For Huang, a political dissident from China, art is a political voice that reinforces his politics of identity.  His work reflects the role of art as political activism and an instrument for identity making.  Huang connects East with West by interweaving cultural elements with his political voice and plays the role of a cultural ambassador of both cultures.  The Dragon Boat offers multiple interpretations and unbridled imagination as Huang invites viewers to journey between East and West.  While Huang expresses his Chinese transcultural identity, Rina Banerjee deals with her South Asian Indian cultural heritage. [paragraph 8]

Rina Banerjee

The next room with a high ceiling exhibited several South Asian Indian installations, which included a bright pink vinyl construction suspended from the ceiling by wires.  The artist, Rina Banerjee, was born in Calcutta, India in 1963.  She emigrated to London, England with her family and eventually moved to the United States.  Banerjee completed an MFA at Yale and currently lives and works in Vermont and Brooklyn, New York.  Her installation entitled “Take Me, Take Me, Take Me…To the Palace of Love” is a tent-like vinyl replica of the famous Taj Mahal in Agra, India.  The original Taj Mahal embodies the romantic story of the Indian Maharajah or Emperor Shah Jehan who loved his wife Mumtaz Mahal so much that after her death at age 39 he built a mausoleum in 1631 in her memory in the form of a marble mosque and called it Taj Mahal or Crown Palace. [paragraph 9]

Rina Banerjee used plastic construction materials to build a voluminous floating replica of the Taj Mahal using bright pink plastic wrap for the exterior walls and industrial PVC pipe for the interior structure of the building.  Bright colors and intricately decorated patterns of traditional Indian motifs on a high-back Mughal throne chair add visually intense, glowing elements to create a shining sensation.  The highly engraved decorative Indian throne, suspended over a world globe, anchors and centers the floating pink Taj Mahal plastic-wrap palace.  Her installation drifts back and forth between the real and the ephemeral as does the sentimental dreams of immigrants about their homeland.  [paragraph 10]

In another installation entitled “Pink Eye,” Rina Banerjee placed toy tea sets and a dollhouse on a cluster of tea tables covered with pink plastic tablecloths, which rest on a lotus-shaped wooden platform.  The tiny tea sets are embedded within the large installation, which makes intimate connections between the artwork, the artist and the viewer. The playfulness of the dollhouse and tea sets reveals socio-political issues associated with two hundred years of British colonialism in India.  Tea, India, and England are intertwined in the political implications of a long history of two nations, one as the colonizer and the other as the colony. [paragraph 11]  

Through art Banerjee expresses her political views about the history of British colonialism where serving high tea symbolized the class and caste division between the colonizer and the colony.  Through her installation she explores issues of her Indian and hybrid cultural identity and expresses the meaning of life as an immigrant in England and America.  She is investigating the historical context of India and England, while comparing it to America’s global dominance symbolized by the portrait of George Washington in her installation. [paragraph 12]

Both artists in their large-scale installations at Mass MoCA explore their cultural heritage and hybrid identities through historical objects they selected from thousand of pieces in the SPNEA collection.  The objects they integrated into their artworks represent the best examples of personal and political history by mixing and blending East with West. [paragraph 13]

Acknowledgement: We wish to express thanks to Ms. Katherine Myers, Director of Public Relations at Mass MoCA, for granting permission to take photos of the artworks and providing information about the museum’s history.

Recommended Citation in the APA Style:

Caruso, H. Y.& Caruso, J. (2004). Yankee remix at Mass MoCA. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 6(1),13 paragraphs.  Retrieved your-access-month date, year, from http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2004spring/art_reviews.html