MARCH 2 – APRIL 21
Main Gallery
Virtual tour available online March 8
Edible was an exhibition that explored how Asian-American artists use ceramics incorporating food aesthetics to explore cultural identity, memory, and American society. Our relationship to what we eat is the most intimate possible: the food we consume literally constitutes our bodies, and the ways we consume it link us to each other, our loved ones, and our ancestors. Ceramic sculpture in the form of food has become a way for these artists to explore complex relationships to their identities and bodies.
For artist Anika Hsiung Schneider, representations of food and ordinary kitchen objects are a way of understanding her, “Chineseness through [her] Americanness.” Jacqueline Tse’s porcelain dessert sculptures comment on American consumerism and her own relationship to sugar, while also serving as memento mori through the color white, associated with death in Chinese culture. Schneider, Tse, and other artists, draw on their experiences to make new icons of food that remix historical objects, symbols, and materials. Evocative and playful, potent and bittersweet, Edible included artists working across the United States who took diverse approaches to understanding identity through ceramics and food.
Participating artists included: Ling Chun, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Cathy Lu, Anika Hsiung Schneider, and Jacqueline Tse.
About the Artists
Ling Chun states, “I have a drive, a lust, and a greed for color.” Chung is a multimedia artist from Hong Kong, and her work represents the coexistence of multicultural identities within a single society. Her practice focuses on creating artifacts which speak about history with a contemporary sensibility. In her execution and conceptualization of creative projects, Chun brings together her knowledge of Chinese culture and her contemporary artistic vision. She aspires to create public artifacts to bring relevance to historical storytelling in her future artistic pursuits. “Breaking expectations and perceptions—my surfaces extend even beyond the form, bursting with unusual, surprising materials, including the use of hair. I believe contemporary ceramics will serve as a latter-day artifact of our current acknowledgement of cultural identity. It is a material strongly connected with history but never limited just to its heritage—a new age of ceramics will be one where style is no longer restricted to the old forms.”
Chun earned her BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence). Chun is the recipient of numerous awards including several grants and fellowships from the Archie Bray Foundation (Helena, MT), an Art Bridge Fellowship from Pratt Fine Arts Center (Seattle), and an 2020 NCECA Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her worldwide exhibitions include shows at Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (New York), Honos Art (Rome), and Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art (Gwangju, South Korea). Her residency experience includes c.r.e.t.a. rome (Italy), Arquetopia Foundation and International Artist Residency (Puebla, Mexico), and Seward Park Clay Studio (Seattle). Chun is currently based in Washington where she works as a ceramic educator at North Seattle College and Seward Park Clay Studio.
Jennifer Ling Datchuk is an artist born in Warren, Ohio and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is an exploration of her layered identity–as a woman, a Chinese woman, as an “American,” and as a “third-culture kid.” Trained in ceramics, Datchuk works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work—such as textiles and hair—to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and personal history. Her practice evolved from sculpture to mixed media as she began to focus on domestic objects and the feminine sphere. Handwork and hair both became totems of the small rituals that fix, smooth over, and ground women’s lives. Through these materials, she explores how Western beauty standards influenced the East, how the non-white body is commodified and sold, and how women’s—globally, girls’—work is still a major economic driver whose workers still struggle for equality.
Datchuk holds a BFA in crafts from Kent State University (OH) and an MFA in artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She has received grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio (TX), a travel grant from Artpace San Antonio (TX), and the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program (Kansas City, MO) to research the global migrations of porcelain and blue and white pattern decoration. She was awarded a residency through Contemporary at Blue Star (San Antonio, TX) to conduct her studio practice at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Germany) and has participated in residencies at The Pottery Workshop (Jingdezhen, China), European Ceramic Work Centre (Oisterwijk, Netherlands), and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry Residency (Sheboygan, Wisconsin).
In 2017, she received the Emerging Voices Award from the American Craft Council and in 2020 was named a United States Artist Fellow in Craft. Her work has been featured in a solo publication Jennifer Ling Datchuk: Half through French and Michigan (San Antonio, TX), and included in Artpace at 25, Black Cube: A Nomadic Museum, The Guardian, Vogue, and American Craft. Her work is in the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans). She is currently an assistant professor of ceramics at Arizona State University (Tempe) and lives and maintains a studio practice in Phoenix, Arizona.
Cathy Lu is a ceramics-based artist who manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to explore how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity. “By creating ceramic-based sculptures and large scale installations, I explore what it means to be both Asian and American, while not being entirely accepted as either.”
Lu received a BA and BFA from Tufts University (Medford, MA) and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Galerie du Monde (Hong Kong), among many others. She is the recipient of several awards including a 2020 NCECA Emerging Artist Fellowship, an Asian Cultural Council Individual Fellowship (NY), and a Pratt Travel Grant from School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). She has completed numerous residencies including Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass Village, CO), Irving Street Projects (San Francisco), and Mudflat Studio (Somerville, MA). She currently teaches at Tufts University.
Anika Hsiung Schneider creates work that simultaneously speaks to being Chinese American as well as to whiteness. “It is about how this whiteness (of society and my family) has always shaped my understanding of myself. This work takes my Chinese-self and recreates it through an American understanding of Chinese identity. In a way that subverts, reclaims, and mirrors Europeans’ invention of chinoiserie, something that is not at all Chinese but also based upon Chineseness. With an Asian Mixed female identity, I reside in a highly-racialized body which also exists in a liminal state. This liminal state of being transports my work to themes of loss, transitional spaces, visualizing the intangible, and redefining my identity on my own terms. My artwork manipulates and reimagines Chinese imagery through a multimedia approach. My childhood home was entrenched with both Chinese objects (such as chopstick holders, fans, and vases) to typical Americana domestic objects (such as vintage Tupperware colanders and cornflower-patterned Corningware). The Chinese aspects of my work are at once deeply familiar and distant to me, like artifacts of a past I do not fully know. Through the act of recreating and restructuring Chinese symbols, I am creating my own narrative of what it means to be Chinese, to have a Chinese family, and yet struggle with cultural gaps by creating a visual identity that is distinctly my own.”
Schneider received her BS in studio art and environmental studies from Gettysburg College, (PA) and her MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Her work has been exhibited nationally at galleries including Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis), Dumbarton Concerts Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and Landmark Center Ramsey County Historical Society Gallery (Saint Paul, MN). She has also participated in the Ayatana Artist Research Program, (Nova Scotia, Canada), the In Cahoots Residency Boost Prize full grant (Petaluma, CA), and the Artist in Action Residency at Ann Marie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center (Solomons, MD). Her awards include Windgate University Fellowship from Arrowmont School of Art and Craft (Gatlinburg, TN), Gettysburg College Provost Grant (PA), and a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. Schneider currently lives and works in Minneapolis where she serves as the director of exhibitions and artist programs at Minnesota Center for Book Arts and is adjunct faculty at MCAD.
Jacqueline Tse was born in San Jose, California and raised between Hong Kong and the US. Her lush sculptural offerings are “highly influenced by my anxieties of being human, particularly the dilemmas of everyday urban life. It is an ongoing exploration of my fascination with American society of excess and shameless consumerism, social media overstimulation, greed and gluttony as a remedy for emotional disconnection. Meanwhile still celebrating the beauty and flaws of these fragile human conditions.”
Tse earned her BFA from New York University in Studio Arts in 2006. She then launched directly into a career in design. In 2017, after a decade of working in the fashion industry in New York designing jewelry for established American brands, and “ethically burdened by capitalism, corporate greed, and culture of excess consumerism, she returned to her passion of sculpting as a form of self-therapy.” Her work has been exhibited in galleries across the Unites States including Talon Gallery (Portland, OR), House of Novogratz (Venice, CA), and Contempop Gallery (New York). Her awards include the 61st Faenza Prize through the International Competition of Contemporary Ceramic Art (Italy), 2020 NCECA Multicultural Fellowship, and was a Sculpture Award finalist for Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize (Armidale, Australia). She has participated in a residency at Salem Art Works (NY). She currently resides and maintains a studio practice in Tucson, Arizona.
Related Events
Artist Talk: Anika Hsiung Schneider
Edible artist Anika Hsiung Schneider presented a discussion of their practice and how it relates to this incredible exhibition.
NCC’s Library, FREE
Artist Demonstration: Jacqueline Tse
Edible artist Jacqueline Tse demonstrated some of the techniques used to create the compelling use of molds and pastry work featured in the exhibition.
FREE
Edible Artist Discussion Panel
Attendees joined the artists participating in Edible as they explored the ways that their practices intersect with one another and the core themes of the exhibition. This discussion, guided by curator Olivia Comstock, presented the opportunity for the artists to consider how the use of food aesthetics are used to explore cultural identity, experiences of immigration, and American society.
NCC’s Library, FREE
Artist Talk: Jennifer Ling Datchuk
Edible artist, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, shared a glimpse into their personal art practice and how it intersected with the exhibition.
NCC Library, FREE