The lone film in the eastern wing of the Pleasant T. Rowland Galleries in the Chazen Museum of Art is an experimental stop-motion animation by world-renowned Chinese sculptor and mixed media artist Geng Xue (耿雪). Her first time working with video has resulted in the thirteen-minute handcrafted porcelain Mr. Sea [海公子] (2014) that is projected on the west-facing wall as part of the “Tradition and Innovation: The Human Figure in Contemporary Chinese Art” exhibition through July 5.
In touring the galleries, one may first be lured to the surrealistic short from afar – much like explorer Zhang Sheng to the mysterious island of the film’s origin lore – by audio alone. The percussive-ambient sound design evokes an ominous aural concoction of the sea, wind, and gulls. At first sight, the timbres transform into an erratic pulse as the polished ceramic figure of Zhang is beguiled by the false paradise that materializes his desires and memories.
But the hypnotizing palette of pristine whites accentuated with lush indigo paint and patterns-textures in the porcelain – from the smooth opacity of the human body threaded with transparent plastic lace to the perilous island’s sinuous tree branches that resemble human digits – truly lend Xue’s vision its most unbreakable gravity that contrast with an ineffably fragile antiquity that reverberates as porcelain hands tap their own bodies. Unifying themes of beauty, eroticism, and violence in the vitreous material, Mr. Sea augments its ghostly source, “Killing the Serpent,” a fable from The Strange Tales of Liaozhai by Pu Songling in the late seventeenth century during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).
In a recent interview with Alessandro De Toni for Cool Hunting, the Beijing-educated Xue reveals her early fascination in life for the porcelain’s “richness of transformations.” Preference for the glassy ceramic material, crafted with kaolin clay, perfectly lends itself to her vivid interpretation of the story and falls under the thematic umbrella of the Chazen exhibit that evinces the sea changes throughout China’s traditions in art.
As surrounding water turns to tears and then to blood in the Mr. Sea‘s thrillingly sensuous descent, the frail psychology of Zhang is unnervingly rendered through a cycle of sensual, shadowy cuts and oblique angles. The temptation for the Western viewer is to liken the mood to the eternal Greek mythological tale of the sirens tempting Odysseus towards certain doom, but Xue’s wordless cinematic translation, compounded with its presentation in the gallery on infinite loop, articulates a complexity of emotion the transcends both time and text.
- Mr. Sea and a small selection of Geng Xue’s other mixed media works are currently exhibited in the Chazen’s first floor Pleasant T. Rowland Galleries as part of “Tradition and Innovation: The Human Figure in Contemporary Chinese Art” through July 5. The museum is FREE and open to the public, and its hours of operation can be found here.