‘Overgrown’, a foam and fiberglass sculpture by Puxuan Zhou standing at 120cm tall, is ironically stunted. The form of a human head and torso sprouts from the ground, a beanstalk-like leafy structure taking the place of hips and legs, and the ribs are organically curved, as though halfway between plant and human. The man’s face carries an expression of extreme discomfort, and his arms are clutched around his torso, closing him off from the world around him. It is like a distortion of the family tree: the branches that grow from the root are strangled and cut off in a radical refusal to accept the image that, since ancient times, has proved the hierarchical connections from one generation to the next. Countless Kings and Emperors have claimed descent from Gods, drawing up family trees to prove it. Biologists have used phylogenetic trees to demonstrate the evolution of species, and even literary critics have used the idea of the tree to think about how one text gives rise to another. However, as the fiberglass man clutches his arms, limbs like distorted branches, to his chest – he cuts off any burgeoning connections. The concept of the family tree suggests the sculpture is painfully overgrown.
This isn’t necessarily the objective of the artist or even the curator. However, ‘Hidden Narratives’, the exhibition of which ‘Overgrown’ is part, is designed to nuance the connections between artworks. The exhibition is the second of its kind organised by ModA Curations, whose founder, George Fan, anthropologist, Esther Fan, and curator, Sia Fang, aim to use artistic narrative to allude to anthropological theory. They believe that the role of a curator is to ‘observe and translate the world through creative form’, using anthropology to mediate between artist and viewer. However, this mediation doesn’t fit into the traditional hierarchy of the family tree. The relation between art and viewer and curator isn’t linear, but a web of connections to artistic history, the culture of artist and viewer, and the other artworks around it. Esther links one artist, Anna Ting Möller, to anthropologists Deleuze and Guattari, who ‘propose how relations are rhizomatic, lateral entanglements that move through and around fissures, nuancing connectedness’. Based in LA, but connecting seven artists from across the globe, ‘Hidden Narratives’ demonstrates how connections aren’t linear like the branches of a tree, but rhizomatic, extending outwards and amongst themselves in infinite directions, with no clear beginning or end.
Möller’s work is made from acrylic stretched over wooden frames. The works, titled ‘Åker’ (‘Arable Land’), ‘Farm Field I’, and ‘Farm Field II’ look alternatively like skin and arable land, drawing attention to the connection between a person and their land of origin. However, they also emphasise a more complex origin of their own. Möller is Swedish, however, their birth mother is Chinese. When they went to China to search for their origin, a kind stranger welcomed them to stay in their home, where she gifted them a jar of ‘Mother kombucha’. When Möller created their artworks, they infused the acrylic sheets with descendants from the mother jar. The familial nature of the ‘Mother kombucha’ and the hospitality afforded to Möller in China complicates the kinship hierarchy between Möller, her work, and the gifter. The artwork owes creation to Möller but also the kombucha, which in turn owes its existence to both the gifter and Möller’s mother, without whom it wouldn’t have come into the artist’s hands. In the combination of Swedish and Chinese influences, kinship connections become less simple than a single line from one origin or another, but a complex web with lines all feeding into a common convergence point. It is no longer linear but fragmented and simultaneous. To reuse Deleuze and Guattari’s book title, Möller’s works are like a thousand plateaus layered on top of and around each other. ‘Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau’. Despite the vast difference between works like Zhou’s ‘Overgrown’ and Möller’s ‘Farm Fields’ and ‘Arable Land’, a connection can be drawn. As Zhou refuses to allow hierarchical growth in his sculptures, Möller flattens hers to include the interlocking and interchange between each part. ‘Anthropologists,’ Esther writes, ‘dismantle the kinship hierarchy, showing how heritage is constructed in many ways’.
Where ‘Overgrown’ is static and uncomfortable, and Möller’s sculptures are interlinked yet bleak, Antonio Vidal’s ‘El Piso es Lava II’ is bursting with colour. Green shapes crowd a jungle scene, growing outwards from the canvas to meet the viewer. Shapes initially resembling plants take on a human form, before a closer look reveals that what appeared to be a head is just a flower, and the body a plant. In the middle of the canvas, branch-like humans hang from limb-like branches. The people are shaped like chromosomes, re-introducing the idea of kinship into the exhibition. It becomes a primordial relationship, in which the line between nature and human is blurred and humanity is reduced to the simplest form—its own DNA. As DNA is shared across cultures, so are stories. Esther points out Claude Levi-Strauss’ observation that myths share commonalities across cultures. The Cinderella story, for example, is repeated in different forms across the globe. The same is true of ‘El Piso es Lava’, or ‘The Floor is Lava’. Children from diverse cultures play at suspension above the ground, just as the figures in Vidal’s painting are suspended from the branches. We all share something of the collective, whether that be myths or games. As Esther points out, for Vidal, ‘I is both personal and collective’. As a child plays, they discover both themself and a shared societal memory.
When Sia, ModA’s curator, selected her featured artists, she looked for similarities rather than differences. With a focus on diversity, this initially seems counterintuitive. However, as Vidal’s work demonstrates, cultures across the globe share perhaps more common ground than differences. This shared cultural memory is like a third space or dream world in which the geographically disparate become close. Simon Kubik experiments with this space, using half-realised images on a parchment-coloured background. ‘Pigeon vs. Human (Pigeon Wins)’ is surreal—a giant pigeon stands on a human foot—and the faces of both pigeon and human are invisible. The picture can only be personal, but without the recognition of a face, the image is more a dreamlike comment on the collective. In ‘Liebe Ist Forstarbeit’, the picture fades into nothing in several places, like a fading memory. In each of these paintings an absence is produced. Deleuze and Guattari would call this a kind of deterritorialisation, as the artworks are un-coupled from the physical world. Like dreams themselves, they underscore the untethered nature of dreams, and how the subconscious can play a role in self-construction—a different kind of origin. Like the rest of the exhibition, these works complicate origin, highlighting the patchy, non-hierarchical way in which one artwork links to another.
The works in the exhibition play on these connections to create links across geographies and times. Sheila Karbassian’s ‘The World Can Wait’ shows a woman almost disappearing into a patterned background, much like the figures in Vidal’s ‘El Piso’. Her skirt flows like a river from her waist, with cut out fish swimming upstream. Beads wrap loosely around her wrist and neck; and in her hand she holds a fruit that becomes whole only when overlaid against the leaves in the background pattern. Under her elbow, she balances a globe. The paper and acrylic artwork lies in conversation with art history from another time and place—the ‘Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth the First. Where Karbassian’s woman holds the globe precariously under her elbow, Elizabeth arrests it with an outstretched hand. The ocean in Elizabeth’s background represents the threat of the Spanish Armada, but Karbassian’s oceanic skirt is a part of the woman. Both are swamped and encroached upon by their clothing and backdrop, but whilst Elizabeth appears almost straitjacketed, Karbassian’s woman is comfortably and loosely robed. The ‘Armada Portrait’ shows a Queen on the precarious edge of Empire, the other at the other side, both temporally and politically. However, the relationship isn’t cause and effect. ‘The World Can Wait’ isn’t a result of empire, and doesn’t even show the effects of it. Even if Elizabeth I’s attempts at Empire had been focused on Iran, where Kabassian grew up, there would be no direct link from one portrait to the other. If their visual similarities are significant, it is not because of a historic link, but a contemporary one. The paintings look at one another across a fun-house mirror, each, in a contemporary context, interpreting and distorting the other.
It is like the constellations in one of Karbassian’s other works, ‘Bathing Blue’. In a landscape with no discernable human mark, a viewer can find meaning in the constellations scattered across the sky. The hidden narratives behind the stars are variously interpreted across cultures, but in ‘Bathing Blue’ any viewer can bring their own culture and stories into the mix. The greenery in bathing blue is beautiful, peaceful, and proportionate—anything but overgrown, like Zhou’s sculpture. It acts as a meeting place for a complex web of personal and collective, general and specific. The meaning of the art across the exhibition doesn’t stem from the artist like a tree, but erupts from the viewer, artist, and hidden narratives in between. The artist/author may not be dead, as Roland Barthes famously argued, but the family tree certainly is.
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