In 2010, Kirk Ke Wang and Theo Wujcik did something they'd never anticipated. For Visual Unity 2, an exhibit of collaborative artworks organized by artist-curator Rocky Bridges at the Polk Museum of Art, the two artists made a painting together, literally shuttling an 8-foot-tall canvas back and forth between their studios. For the former professor and student — Wujcik taught art at USF while Wang was a graduate student there — the project rekindled a connection both artistic and personal.
“We renewed our friendship,” Wang said during an interview then.
The crux of their collaboration was a mutual interest in Asia. For Wujcik, a Detroit-born artist in his 70s, the continent represents what’s next in industry and contemporary art; for Wang, a Chinese-American just past 50, Asia is a home that isn’t home anymore. (As he departed Shanghai for New York in the ’80s, Wang told himself to take one last look at a place where he hoped never to return as a permanent resident.) The idea of Asia, as seen from an American or hybrid perspective, looms large in the current work of both men.
After their first collaborative success, Polk Museum of Art curator Adam Justice offered Wujcik and Wang a two-person show. Though Oct. 13, 19 of their paintings — 10 by Wujcik, nine by Wang — and one collaborative installation make up Invisible Elephant, an exhibit that fills the museum’s two largest galleries. The title refers to an Asian proverb about the limits of knowledge: What happens when a group of blind people tries to define what an elephant is? Using their hands, each person feels out a small part; only collectively can they learn anything about the whole.
“The two of us try to touch the elephant to figure out what is going on this world,” Wang says.
Last week, I met with both artists at the Polk Museum of Art and asked them to tell me more about their works.
“Ai Wei Wei in Contemplation of Jade,” 2012. Wujcik’s large — 102 inches high by 90 inches wide — portrait of Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is reminiscent of his decades-earlier silverpoint drawings of American artists including James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell. Wujcik became friends with those artists while working at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles during the 1970s; his delicate, super-detailed drawings of them were collected by the Museum of Modern Art and other prestigious institutions.
In recent years, Wujcik has admired the headline-grabbing work of Chinese artists Ai and Zhang Huan (a Shanghai and New York-based artist known for his physically grueling performance art). His portrait of Ai is painted in shades of red, a nod to the scarlet mineral cinnabar used historically in Chinese arts as a decorative pigment. The painting focuses on Ai’s face and his enigmatic gaze, which reflects flecks of green as if he were beholding a piece of jade.
Wujcik’s historically inflected homage seems apt to Ai, who is known for provocative works that involve the destruction of antique Chinese vessels as well as his avid Twittering against the Chinese government. Two other paintings in the exhibit lionize Zhang: one shows the artist standing in front of his “Berlin Buddha” ash sculpture, a 2007 piece; the other depicts him as a Frankensteinian assemblage of comic book hero body parts, enduring his famed 1994 performance piece, “12 Square Meters,” for which Zhang coated himself with oil and honey and sat for an hour on a Beijing public toilet infested with insects.
“I realized in retrospect when I set myself up as a PR person for the California artists that it was similar to what I did as a teenager, drawing pictures of our gang, the Chuck-a-lucks,” Wujcik says. “It was only natural that I would gravitate to the Asian invasion.”
“Chained Bird,” 2012. Wang pays his own homage to Ai with this painting. The canvas is divided in two; on the left side, a pattern of black dots reveals a portrait of Ai when viewed from a distance. (Up close, the image is completely abstract; aim your camera phone at the painting to appreciate the effect fully.) On the right, Wang paints a small bird chained to a metal perch in reference to Ai’s unofficial status as a prisoner of the Chinese government. The landscape in the background resembles a painting by Zhu Da, an 18th-century member of China’s elite who became a monk, then an artist.
Wang identifies with Ai; both men moved from China to New York in the 1980s. After studying at USF and landing a job at Eckerd College, Wang became an American citizen. Ai returned to China and became a celebrity, but at the price of dangerous clashes with the country’s authorities.
“What is luckiness?” Wang asks. “He became a star, but I got freedom.”
“Imperial Jade Quarter Pounder with Cheese,” 2008. Like “Morning Glory,” a painting that depicts an Egg McMuffin beneath a bodhisattva head or “Benevolent Dragon,” one that replaces a dragon’s scales with Florida oranges, this painting fuses Western and Eastern iconography. Wujcik originally hoped to craft a jade sculpture of the McDonald’s mainstay, readily available throughout Asia. When that proposition proved too expensive, he settled on painting a surreally perfect and plastic-looking picture of a jade burger that’s guaranteed to make you laugh and salivate at the same time.
“Toys and Toy Maker,” 2011. China’s toy trade is a near-obsession for Wang, who recently visited the country’s center of toy distribution in Yiwu. On the left stands an angry-looking group of musclebound male toys; on the right, one of Wang’s black dot paintings depicts a nude woman posing seductively. She is a toy-maker who works in a Chinese factory, a friend of a friend who agreed to pose for the painting.
“The Temple,” 2012. The only collaborative piece in the show is an installation — added in September — that fills one gallery. Designed to mimic the contemplative environment of a temple, the work includes two lion sculptures, one made of resin illuminated with red light from within, the other made of styrofoam to look like faux-jade; Wang's wall-mounted mandala of ceramic dumplings; a video, projected onto a screen of sand on the floor; and fragments of decorative Asian screens remixed as found-object paintings by Wujcik. The mesmerizing environment provides a place to ruminate on the two artists‘ cross-cultural conversation.
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2012.