Ongoing
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, The Pocket, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
The Pocket is on view in Across Asia: Arts of Asia and the Islamic World.
Artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann draws from Chinese and European art traditions to create abstracted fantasy spaces that are decidedly tactile and dimensional. Mann’s work combines collage, mosaic, acrylic paint, sumi ink, and cut paper. The Pocket resonates with historical works in Across Asia in its explorations of the natural world and symbolic imagery with deep cultural reaches into Chinese art history. However, Mann examines these enduring themes through a unique perspective informed by her identity as a biracial, second-generation Asian American.
In The Pocket, I formed images of leaf litter, weeds, gourds, and geometric shapes in grouted stone, glass and ceramic mosaic, then collaged over parts of those images with chrysanthemums, bats, peaches, orchids, and plum blossoms painted with sumi ink and acrylic on lacily cut rice paper. By combining texturally opposite materials in these mosaic/rice paper amalgams, I further my exploration of cultural estrangement, fracture, and chimera. The piece dances between the gestural fluidity of traditional sumi ink painting, the solidity of mosaic, the fragility of rice paper and the hard earthiness of stone—combining some of the most ancient materials from European and Chinese art history into a fragmented, melting, and sublimating abstract world.
Like the pocket universes in the science fiction novel The Three Body Problem, The Pocket draws from our immediate landscape and history to create a portal to another world.
Across Asia: Arts of Asia and the Islamic World was curated by Ani Proser, Chief Curator and Curator of Asian Art; Dany Chan, Associate Curator of Asian Art; and Ashley Dimmig, Guest Curator and former Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art.