Chinese. Japanese. Indian Chief.
OPENS 4/12/2012 ENDS 6/16/2012 (0) Hosfelt Gallery
531 West 36th Street
New York, NY
Phone:
212-563-5454
The title of Julie Chang's exhibition, Chinese. Japanese. Indian Chief, refers to a children's game she remembers playing with her friends in elementary school. Chang's newest body of work, comprised of 84 hyper-colorful paintings on panel ranging from 12 x 12 to 24 x 96 inches, is full of archetypes of Japanese, Chinese, and Native American cultures. Teepees, Chinese pagodas, and Japanese rainbows proliferate as ostensibly innocuous design elements layered and intertwined in repetitive patterns. The unexpected co-mingling of these diverse images foregrounds their shared similarity in representing "the other." Chang combines these symbols with other images referencing childhood memories of achievement, status and assimilation as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, growing up with obligatory piano, ballet and tennis lessons in the quintessential land of golden promise, Orange County, California.