Still Life with a Stamp of a Painting by Lang Shi Ning

My preparations for my two person exhibition with Una Kim are under way. Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek is shaping up to be a lovely and thought provoking show. Just as the title suggests, the exhibition is about two artists who trained in both Asia and the United States. We both met at Parsons School of Design in 1988, where we completed our graduate education in figurative painting and drawing. But we both had another side of our artistic selves that had previously been nurtured in a very different tradition. Una was an artist in Korea before the U.S. and I had lived in the People’s Republic of China for many years, where I trained in Chinese language and studio art at the Central Academy of Fine Art. East/West art is difficult to reconcile, as the crux of what is considered "right" and "good" in art is fundamentally different.

Through our art work, we acknowledge that which is translatable and that which is not. While engaged in translating an aesthetic, we are also introducing visual commentary on the what has been transformative in the years since leaving formal education behind. This includes confronting the cultural challenge of being an immigrant for Una and confronting a life changing illness for me.

After many years of difficult work, my body has become stronger and more capable of doing the work of writing, creating art work, and most recently, teaching again (albeit ever so slightly). My most recent work reflects that in its shift in focus from the transformed body on to the Translations part of our exhibition. It is still rendered in the black and white of my Kafkaesque drawings, but now plays with language and cross cultural influences. Some of this is subtle, as in my flattened out drawings of postage stamps and textile art. Enjoy here a drawing that includes a stamp with a picture of a painting by Lang Shi Ning, an eighteenth century Italian artist who traveled to China during the Qing dynasty and became a court painter for the emperor.