To the Asian Grocery Store!
ilmed by Christina Daly & Arete Xu
Installation View
Prologue
I try to make sense of what I see. Asian decorative art pieces are served less on a silver platter and more served half-baked by museums. I noticed that ‘Aisles’ in museums have a hand in this, as they make in-between things, like craft and export pieces caught between Aisles of Asian Art and Decorative Arts, an oddity. Since the golden age of East Asian Art collecting in the nineteenth century, pieces have made their way into American and European museums. For the scope of this project, I will focus on Japanese and Chinese craft pieces and their specific intertwined history in museums. They were difficult to categorize, so classification terminologies and visual languages were invented to sort them and be appreciated in their new homes. But, these languages sorts them into aisles that fail to describe their whole state of being.
And so, I set out to find new ways to describe and look at these craft pieces, which are often blank canvases. How do I find a new way of looking to help them from falling through the cracks?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2