Hai-Wen Lee: drobe
What and why are these pale blue and white striped sewn fabrics curiously draped over Chinese antique furniture and ceramics huddled in a makeshift pile?
Hai-Wen Lin mined the archives and collections of this museum to pose a similar question and their answer hopefully transforms the very notion of how antiquity and modernity interconnect, overlap, and even juxtapose within a contemporary world that is blurred, neutral, and fluid.
So pardon the pun when I proffer the artist is “redressing” their past through the act of garbing to reconcile perceptions of East versus West by figuratively dressing up these Emperors beyond her new robes in their project somewhere between Daniel Buren who created works intrinsically linked to environment and Christo wrapping things to seem refreshed. Objets d’art previously displayed as artifacts within the museum, set on a pedestal, or behind glass vitrines, frozen in time that Lin now re-activates, if not reanimates.
For these precious treasures, once common, everyday items, albeit of exceptional craftsmanship and quality, used as utilitarian objects then are no longer relegated to history and portrayed as relics but now become refashioned, unwrapped of its mummified past.
Photo credit: YoungSun Choi