Vessels & Banners 2009

Vesse ls & Bannersf rom the Scanning China Pro ject

2006-2009by Sean Just ice

2Vessel: Ceramic 948 (2008)

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The Scanning China Project:Learning to Live and Work in China

In 2005 I began working extensively in Beijing & Shanghai,

teaching photography, exploring Chinese pictorial culture,

and reconnecting with my memories of growing up in Asia.

This project is an exploration of how it felt to be there, an

emotional history of my work in China, and a meditation on

what happens when cultural currents come together.

Vessels & Banners is an exhibit of pigmented ink prints on cot-

ton rag paper. The exhibit is available for installation. Pictures

are available as fine-prints and licensed imagery.

Swimming at the Center of the World is a visual-essay ex-

ploring the experience of working in China, combining pho-

tographs, photo-montage, and text in the form of poetry,

aphoristic observations, and expository essays. A book

dummy is available; sample page-spreads are available on

seanjustice.com.

Connections is a web-based resource guide for Western

artists who want to explore projects in China —in progress

at http://scanningchinaproject.com/connections.

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The Vessels

2006 - 2009






10 10Vessel: Ceramic 43 (2008)






1616opposite: Banner: Wall (singular), Shanghai (2007)

April is Asian Heritage Month at New York University,

and the Wagner School is proud to conjointly

feature, in our gallery space, a captivating collection of

photographic prints inspired by one of the continent’s

most prominent and influential cultures. With Scanning

China: Vessels & Banners, photographer and graphic

artist Sean Justice presents, for the first time to the

public, a sampling from his on-going self-exploratory

project which closely delves into his experiences while

working and living in China.

Compelled by a two-fold desire to reconnect with his

early upbringing in Asia while also surveying the country’s

burgeoning art scene, Sean Justice embarked on a series

of professional and personal ventures that took him to

Beijing and Shanghai between 2005 and 2007. During this

two-year stretch, Chinese culture remained surprisingly

hidden to the artist—a mysterious space where daily life

offered a fascinating array of expected and unexpected

interactions. This constant state of surprise—at once

perplexing and alluring—led Justice to examine his own

process of cultural assimilation as well as to ponder the

mechanisms by which one recognizes and experiences

culture in general. As such, a profound sense of

unknowing influences the photographs and composite

prints of Scanning China, where familiar objects and

vessels (bamboo sticks, rice bowls, tea cups and flower

vases) purchased in local flea markets are distorted and

re-contextualized in ways that render them as pictorial

unknowns. Viewers can grasp the patterns and forms

of the objects, but not see the objects themselves—

an experience that heightens the tension between the

familiar and the unfamiliar and which echoes the artist’s

own cultural journey.

The visual element that most decisively anchors Justice’s

photographic explorations is traditional pottery patterns,

as prominently illustrated in the Vessels. Upon his

arrival in China, Justice was immediately attracted to

the richness and multiplicity of the patterns he came

across on a variety of surfaces, such as ceramic objects

and pottery or even commercial materials and textiles.

Pottery patterns in particular possessed an appealing

emblematic power. The highly recognizable designs,

cultural fingerprints of Chinese aesthetics, soon became

a focus to the artist, as they initially evoked a comforting

sense of familiarity. However, as these elaborate patterns

elicited further investigation (like so much else that

Justice encountered in these cities), they began to reveal

themselves as far more complex and challenging than

originally anticipated. As common and inexpensive

objects, these containers are readily attainable and

easily accessible; yet, as portals of an intricate designing

tradition, they become far more valuable and perplexing.

Justice marveled at this contrast and soon realized that it

applied to his experience of life in Beijing and Shanghai—

two ostensibly homogeneous populaces, and both

underlain with dense and oft-conflicting intersections of

characters, subcultures and dialects. For Justice, these

ornate vessels act as a metaphor for the way in which he

observed and interpreted the cultures that first produced

them.

The sense of below-the-surface intricacy that Justice

discovered in China, and the subsequent communication

breakdowns it frequently led to, are aptly suggested

by the visual distortions of the objects depicted in his

prints. That said, the symbolic significance of these

puzzling images is not limited to their final abstract

forms, but extends as well to the scanning process

employed to produce them. Justice created the Vessels

prints by placing the items directly onto a scanning

bed and shifting their position on the apparatus as the

image was recorded. This idea of capturing objects in

The Exhibit ion at the Wagner Gal lery, New York Universi ty, Spr ing 2008

Curated by Ann Chwatsky

by Frank Crescioni-Santoni & Lynne Thompson, Associate Curators

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motion, of experimenting with the unpredictable creation

of irreproducible images, alludes to the ever-shifting

manner in which Justice himself navigated and dealt with

life in China—continually adjusting to the unexpected

and in equal measures perplexed and delighted by the

outcomes. Like each impression from a moving vessel on

the scanner, each random interaction and communication

mishap always yielded a unique end result. In this sense,

the scanning process becomes an integral part of the

artist’s investigation, and for those who learn about it, as

revelatory of his intentions as the final prints themselves.

The inclusion of two photographs, Bamboo One and Wall,

offers a pronounced thematic and stylistic juxtaposition

to the scanner-originated pieces. Bamboo One and Wall

are relatively straightforward in both form and execution,

inspiring a reflective serenity that stands in sharp contrast

to the tension and mysterious aura of the pottery prints.

If the distorted imagery of the Vessels series has come

to symbolize the hidden delights of the unknown and the

frustrations of miscommunication, the unmanipulated

simplicity of these two photographs could in turn represent

those presumably infrequent moments of uncomplicated

existence in the artist’s journey through China. Under

this interpretational assignment, the operational and

technical attributes of the devices utilized to produce

these two sets of images can, once again, shed some

light onto their metaphoric significance.

With both a scanner and a camera, image production

relies on the interlinked variables of time and space.

However, while a scanner functions by minimizing

space to show how objects are arranged in time, a

camera works (for the most part) by minimizing time

to emphasize how objects are arranged in a three-

dimensional space. With his pottery images, Justice,

in essence, problematizes the scanning process by

shifting the objects during capturing. By adding this

element of motion, he successfully manages to amplify

the otherwise limiting boundaries of the scanner in order

to achieve a desired effect. In the Banners, on the other

hand, the objects remain stationary and their spatial

arrangement undisturbed. With these camera pictures,

both time and space function in simpler terms and within

the expected parameters—the images are captured

almost instantaneously, thus allowing framing and

composition to become the focal elements. For Justice,

these contrasting methods of image production directly

relate to the different ways one processes and copes

with cultural assimilation. Occasionally, these paths are

smooth and easily traversed (the camera pictures), and

often times they are challenging and difficult to scale

(scanned images). The placement of Bamboo One and

Wall as the pieces that respectively open and close the

exhibit is a conspicuous and thought-provoking choice.

Perhaps in their bookend positions, they act as an outer

surface to the abstract and far more complex inner layers

of the interceding Untitled selections.

Whether enticed by a stripped-down wall in Shanghai or

a pattern-rich ceramic from a Beijing flea market, whether

captured by a point-and-shoot camera or by an artfully

manipulated scanner, the prints that comprise Scanning

China: Vessels & Banners pay a personal tribute to an

extraordinary culture and serve as a testament to one

of the most exhilarating experiences in Sean Justice’s

career. Through the artist’s literal and figurative lens,

these objects are no longer mere vessels and containers;

instead, they have become expressive and highly

personal representations of their source culture.

19Banner: White Flowers (3 sections), Shanghai (2007)

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20above: Banner: Open (3 sections), Beijing (2009)

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21next page: Banner: Path (2 sections) Shanghai (2009)

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24Banner: Bamboo Two (5 sections), Shanghai (2009)

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Artist Statement : Banners

Hanging scrolls imprinted with text are an ancient part of Chinese culture, and we have parallel forms in Western culture as well. These segmented pictures are meant to evoke the process of getting under the surface of something we might think we al-ready know. While the ostensible subject matter of each picture flirts with Western clichés about China, I hope that by breaking the surface into layers and then further separating it into indi-vidual hanging slices, a visual assembly process occurs. These aren’t ordinary pictures, and yet they are, really. Simple things and simple moments from my daily life in China—streets, bam-boo, flowers, architectural details, fish ponds—we know these things, even in China. But I hope that the form of the banner precipitates a new experience of them.

Media: Pigmented ink jet prints on cotton rag paper. Sizes and prices vary. Editions of 4 with 2 AP each.

26Vessel: Ceramic 10-2 (2008)

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Artist Statement : Vessels

The Scanning China Project is a meditation on learning about a culture that is different from one’s own.

The Vessel pictures explore a changing metaphor at the heart of our two cultures—the necessity of expressing one’s own in-dividuality in relation to the historical and contingent forms that we have been born into.

In the West we are expected to forge our own path at any ex-pense, to reject the forms of our parents, to rebel against the continuities of the past: to do otherwise would be to live an unexamined cliché.

In China the attitude is vastly different. The forms of the past must be internalized and then reshaped with intimacy, with re-spect for the continuity they represent: to do otherwise would be to cut oneself loose from breath itself.

At this moment in our intermingled time-lines, both cultures are experimenting with revisions of these deeply held positions. These pictures of flea-market ceramics explore the way that ancient continuities (represented by the prototypical forms of common Chinese ceramics) are being reshaped by modern conversations (represented by the moving image scanner tech-nology used to make the pictures).

The conundrum at the center of this work is whether culture is the container of our experience, or if, on the other hand, our individual experience constructs the vessels we use to isolate ourselves from each other.

About the Vessels

Ceramic vessels have been important to me since my early childhood in South Korea, where I saw ancient celadon exca-vated from new fields. Later, looking for pottery shards with my father in Arizona, a broken piece of clay emerging from the desert could evoke fantasies of discovery and deep connec-tions with the past.

Ceramics, physically embedded within the ground of a specif-ic place, become tokens of trade and currency when removed

from that space, and can travel continents and endure centu-ries. As both container and decorated surface, ceramic ves-sels embody the culture of the people who made them, and this physicality and process of transformation—from anony-mous clay to artifact and then back to common earth—touch-es on history, art, science, and the shape of knowledge itself.

The ceramics in these pictures—brush holders, rice bowls, teacups—were excavated from weekend flea markets in Bei-jing and Shanghai. The pictures were made by moving the ceramic across the glass of a flat-bed scanner as the scan-ning sensor was also moving. The ceramic appears warped because it drifted in and out of sync with the sensor during the scan.

As I worked, the glass of the scanner became abraded and smudged by the ceramic surfaces of the vessels, causing the scratches and other texture visible in the pictures. There is no additional “digital” distortion added to the pictures, though in some pictures I’ve added fabric backgrounds which were scanned separately.

Media: Pigmented ink jet prints on cotton rag paper. 13 x 18 inches & 24 x 33 inches, each edition of 10 with 2 AP. Price 13 x 18 $1,100; 24 x 33 $2,500.

About the interplay of Vessels and Banners:

These two series were conceived together and inform each other. At once abstract and yet indexical, I want the flex and push of experience and interpretation to activate in real-time as the viewer absorbs the forms and textures. From picture to picture, and within the pictures, I want to precipitate a dialog about how we know what we think we know.

Sean Justice is an artist, writer and educator in New York. He teaches photography and digital art at New York University, the International Center of Photography, and Parsons The New School for Design. He lives on Staten Island.

For more on this work please see:http://scanningchinaproject.com/http://seanjustice.com/

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Vessels & Banners: Learning to live and work in Chinaby Sean Justice, 2006-2009Exhibition available. Images available for licensing. Contact: [email protected]: http://seanjustice.com/Mobile: U.S. 347-232-5471

Vessel: Ceram

ic 33 (2008)

Vessels & Banners 2009

Documents

scanning china project

scanning china pro ject2006

vessels banners

familiar objects

chinese culture

beijing shanghai

experiences culture

chinese pictorial culture