Archives: Artists

Meet the Artist

Can you give me a little bit of an introduction about yourself?

I’m Chi, originally from China. I was born and raised in Beijing, but my family is in Shanghai, so I’ve spent much of my life moving between the two cities. I completed both my undergraduate and graduate studies in New York and have been dividing my time between these three cities for the past two decades.

I earned my MFA from the School of Visual Arts, graduating ten years ago. Since 2016, I’ve worked as an art educator in China, teaching high school art, including AP, A-level, and IB courses. Currently, I’m working part-time while dedicating myself fully to my art practice.

Do you have a specific art style or artist that influences you?

Yes – there are a few artists that have been influencing my art ever since my school years. For my 2D works, like my paintings and drawings, I would say Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. I look up their work from time to time, to see the way they’ve produced their work, and how they think. More recently, there’s this artist Song Dong, and he does work related to the engagement of daily life. He used a lot of mundane objects, so I’d say he influenced me to do my facial mask project, for sure. Yoko Ono, too, with the simplicity of our life and the universe … connection, everything.

In terms of style, I will always say my work is minimalist – I always try to be as simple as possible, but there are a lot of stories and layers underneath.

Could you talk a little more about your face mask project?

For a lot of my work, not just that one, they don’t begin as an artwork in the beginning. They’re more like small things I do everyday, and then there’s a point that I feel that I have something I could make into artwork. For the facial mask project, it actually started in 2017, and that was the time when I started working as an art teacher – I wanted to be an artist, but I found it more sustainable to be a teacher, to work and make money and then at the same time, practice art. I committed a lot of time to learning so many things, building up my own portfolio … even though I spent so much time doing that, I still managed to spend almost an hour or two every night doing my nighttime skincare routine.

I would say that’s a very normal thing in Asia. People don’t think of that as crazy, and I think it’s just the whole social norm there. You have to fit the beauty standard – you have to look young, and look lean, and have pale skin, which is a really trendy thing that has been going on for thousands of years.
When I see my students, they look up all these influencers on the internet, and they skip meals because they want to look a certain way, which is very unhealthy, because I feel like that’s not the point of life. I will tell them it’s more about eating healthy, exercising, travelling, meeting friends, in order to be both physically and mentally healthy. That’s more important than just having a good appearance.

Now this project has two parts – one is the used facial masks, all the ones I’ve used, all in a stack. I’m planning to collect them to the point that they’re my height, as a self-portrait. I don’t know how long that’s going to take – probably another 20 to 30 years. Another part is the packaging, because I consume so much of them – the brands from Asia, the Swiss brands, French, and American brands. I want to try something new, and even now in Berlin, I want to try something locally. It’s like a documentary.

How do you think the Youth Project intersects with the theme of healing?

I think there’s an overlap. I get questions about what is healing to me. Healing can be a momentary and temporary thing. For example, I love chocolate croissants, so if I’m craving it and I have one, that little bit of healing comes from it. Nothing lasts forever, and everything is temporary, so I want to provide this momentary healing aspect to people’s lives. It’s the same as a facial mask. The facial mask is a day-to-day, mundane thing, and my work is a mundane thing as well. The masks are necessary in order to heal the surface of your skin, so there are layers and aspects to healing within that.

How has Berlin been influencing your practice?

A lot of ways. After visa issues, I had to postpone my residency to the fall, so the very gray, gloomy weather changed the aspect of Berlin for me. I definitely feel like there is a huge weight in the city that comes from the war and the history. The city is like a giant museum from the war. Things move on, but there’s a part that’s still the same. You’re healed, but it’s not completely. There’s a Japanese technique of creating a broken vase, but you’re putting it together with a gold string. So you see that it’s broken, but it’s been put back together, so it’s more beautiful. This is how I feel about Berlin.

I did the first healing painting series in Beijing, during COVID, but it’s such a different city from Berlin. The history of Beijing – going thousands of years back – feels very distant, so I feel less of a connection. With Berlin, it’s not just the city, it’s the history.

I know you put a lot of collages together with photographs in Berlin, like one with photographs from a library. Would that be an example of how themes of healing within the city are present in your work?

Yes – originally, I was just thinking because Berlin can be really loud, with a lot of things going on, the library would be the perfect place to be at this time of year. But this one library I went to, you do see the history, and when you’re in that spot, it’s timeless. It feels like you’ve time traveled. I want my work to have that layer of time, space and healing, with everything combined together. [The paintings based on the collage] aren’t finished yet. I’ve put down the colors first, and the base paint.

For the color scheme for these paintings, do you intuitively apply the colors? How do you go about that?

The colors are actually a reference from the collage. I do use a little bit of intuition – for example, the top one is actually this huge sculpture in that library, and it’s mainly white, but this whole space is a very orange and warm color tone, so I didn’t want the white color to be involved with that sculpture. In libraries, you get lots of good, natural light, which adds a lot of life. I want it to be lively, in a way, and I don’t want these works to be so down, like the color of the season now. They’re different from the ones I did in New York and in Iceland – I used a lot of earth tone in this series – maybe that’s how I feel about the city. Iceland is very blue and cold. And then the New York series is super vibrating.

What plans do you have after the residency?

For the first half of the year, I’m going to work on paintings, because I have a lot of photographs and research documents I did for this year in Iceland, in New York, and in Berlin, and I wanted to finish them. I’m going to a residency in Japan next year, and that’s gonna be in the countryside, very calm and peaceful. I’m in conversation with people about shows coming up – one in Japan, and one in China as well.

I still feel like I need to be distilled with all these thoughts and ideas I want to put together. I want to have solid time working with them. That’s what I did over the summer, in China. I was in the mountains for a while. It was nice, but I got kind of bored, because it’s a mountain, nothing else is there. I still consider myself a city person.

Meet the Artist

Can you give us an introduction about yourself and your background?

I’m Judith. I graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I spent four years there, but it was abruptly stopped by the pandemic in 2020. I moved to London for another year of study in the middle of my undergraduate, and afterwards, I moved to a very small town in China.

It’s a historical town of porcelain industry and ceramics. A lot of people who graduated from art school, they’ve all moved to that town. I don’t know why.

It’s probably that they’re like me – there’s sort of a pressure in China in general – because I was born and raised in Shanghai – living in big cities. Everything needs to be done within a social pace that your parents expect, stuff like that. So escaping from urban life to smaller towns has become a popular move in recent years. That also happens in my artwork as well – the theme of escaping from urban life.

I remember you saying that moving there made you realize how many stars there are. Is that when your interest in astronomy started?

Yes, exactly. Because I think the stars really mark how close you are to nature. Every time I was in Shanghai, I didn’t realize that we have so many stars, especially the moon. You can only see the brightest ones in the sky, because of the severe air pollution and the light pollution. You’re living in a bubble of a man-made world. And you don’t really get any idea of how other kinds of life live.

Was that in addition to the work you were doing before you moved to the suburbs? Or did it break away from the work you were doing before?

I think there are certain connections. I still have a very long-term anxiety that was from Shanghai, a traumatic experience from Chinese education and pressure from school.

But I drive my art direction a little bit different from before. I was talking about control and being in control at the very beginning of my career. That’s also why my previous portfolio website is called Judith Square. the idea of the square, compared to the studio, is a very open space outdoors. So I didn’t name my studio a studio. I called it a square. And I make every work interact with physics. I try to leave many decisions to nature itself.

For example, I do ceramics. And there are a lot of decisions of the color – the appearance is made by the kiln, by the temperature. I used to work with gravity as well. There are ideas around thinking that I don’t have absolute authority when I’m making art. This is also a sort of anxiety treatment as well.

To me, astronomy perfectly follows that formula. It’s not up to us what happens in the sky or the way the earth turns. Or if a comet decides to come down and wipe us all out. We’re not in control at all. Like in China, during the pandemic, Shanghai was totally locked down at the beginning of the year. And at the end of the year, the little town that I lived in was locked down too. All the shops were closing and people didn’t have enough food. People were drawing in the anxiety. So I just ran all the way to the top of the building, to the rooftop. I grabbed a seat and just sat there stargazing. I realized that the stars rise every single year at the same time. They have their own pace and nothing influences their pace. This sort of macroscopic way of thinking really relaxed me a lot.

When did the work with Braille begin? Is this recent, and what led you to that?

When I was looking at the stars, there’s a method when you look at them called Star Bridge. You just build compositions between dots to a shape. And then that links by maybe six or five degrees to another star. This is how you seek deeper, celestial bodies, such as galaxies and all the clusters. So I look at all these spots and think about their compositions, trying to link them from one to the other.

This sort of way of reading the stars made me think of them as a language. We’re making sense of it, at least making them into something comprehensible. So when I read Braille, I realised that they have many connections between them. Braille is also called ‘night language’.

There are so many poetic parallels between Braille and stars. Another thing I realized is that when I take my telescope, everything that shows in my lens is reversed from the natural world. So you see everything upside down. This is how you write and read Braille – you write it from right to left and read from left to right. I’m highly interested in the connections between these two semiotics.

As far as being in Berlin, now that you’re almost finished, how has it been working here with your practice as a whole, but also with your interest in Braille?

In my first proposal to GlogauAIR, I wrote that I was going to paint the night sky outdoors. Then I realized it was too cold, so I didn’t do that. I think that Berlin is very inspiring to me in a lot of ways, even the way of living.

The way I’m thinking about graffiti was just a random decision I made. I wanted to try something different because I didn’t want to repeat myself. Eventually, I’m recreating the Braille project with an advanced version. Just to make sure the work affects the audience. But still, I do think that the study of graffiti made me learn a lot about the composition of urban life again. This sort of urban life is not the specific urban life that I was trying to escape. It’s about freedom of speech in urban life. It’s more about how we treat all these languages and voices. Anonymous voices especially.

On the architectural surface, and the urban surface in general. And they have very weird or interesting compositions happening at the same time. With the tracing of graffiti, I don’t know how that would be linked to an independent project yet. The whole idea of graffiti ensured and reinforced my ideas and my interest in semiotic studies. The very blurred boundary between image and text.

What are your plans for after the residency?

I like Berlin, first of all. This is my first time here – I lived in London and I moved to Ireland as well, but I’ve never been to other parts of Europe. I want to come back if there is a chance. I’m still looking for opportunities in Amsterdam. I do want to move out of my original country and I’m trying to seek a new way of living. This is what all my artworks are doing as well.