Laura Lynn Hsieh: Mahjong and Dumplings
Oversized game tiles made of porcelain rather than ivory and plump fired clay potstickers atop an enlarged wooden steamer certainly look familiar but yet feel absurd, as if stir-fried Pop Art gone trompe l’oeil.
To look at the ordinary, the usual unusually, things taken for granted, like the stuff we eat or use for play in our daily lives informs how the artist Laura Lynn Hsieh reflects upon her so-called Chinese American life. Or another way of saying she really embraces the quotidian. Whether buckling her bathroom floor at home steaming wood to bend or attending games watching her sons on various playing fields, Hsieh is always comfortably at play. She devotes herself wholeheartedly to the joy of our mundane transactions.
Such is the beauty and power of these ceramics accompanied by still and moving images that Hsieh both romanticize and historicize. For the artist intends to serve up Orientalia on a plate and not behind a vitrine as frozen artifact but sincere homage to her ancestral roots. This tightrope she straddles then between craft itself and the traditions associated with its histories becomes the subject and material she artfully navigates. Her work blurs the stereotype to provoke the pun of “Made in China” beyond metaphor as basis for her process. So by literally making china (as in stoneware), Hsieh wryly deconstructs her understanding of what and how the idea of “Chineseness” is often represented and even marketed.
Which, of course, continues her broader investigation into identity, culture, and community, challenging preconceived notions of who she is and what that might mean as a first generation Chinese American.