Porcelain Figurines: Kai Chan

Personal Narrative Dept: But don t take Toronto s word for it: This year s Whitney Biennial, a highly subjective pulse-taking of what s important in American art every two years, featured a remarkable amount of stitching, weaving, carving and other homely skills more associated with humble craft-making than high-minded art. There was a good amount of painting, too, reminding us that that medium is essentially craft as well, according to The Star. At the apex of the conceptual era think black and white performance documentation, piles of symbolically freighted pebbles on the gallery floor, aphoristic text on the wall this border was particularly well-controlled. Perhaps not coincidentally, it s about the time 1976 Chan began making meticulous, craft-and-labour intense pieces using colourful silk thread. The work was also connected to a highly personal narrative in a moment when the personal and hand-wrought was, at best, gauche, stamping Chan s passport with resonant clarity and if you re one to read the still-damp tea leaves at the bottom of contemporary art s most recently consumed cup, you d be hard-pressed not to divine some kind of moment for the apparently homespun techniques of traditional craft. Just in our own hometown, all of the Big Three museums feature, or just featured, major exhibitions that fit the thesis: At the ROM, El Anatsui s arresting hand-wrought aluminum tapestries offer a recycler s take on heroic, narrative fabric-making; at the Power Plant, Pae White s jarringly photo-realistic, computer woven fabric hangings of such things as crinkled plastic wrap and smoke; while at the AGO, Flesh and Blood , Shary Boyle s sensual, labour-intensive show of porcelain figurines and miniatures, among other things, made a bold statement for the hand-made and sensual in a sometimes physically-detached art world. So I suppose we can see Kai Chan as ahead of the curve. For the past 35 years, Chan has been working within his own fascinations, plying the usually well-defined boundary between, as the Whitney put it, the applied and fine arts. As reported in the news.
@t fabric hangings, pae white