Transformations and Translations: Rising Heart

I. P. Stanback Museum
Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek, Part 2
On view August 11 - September 30, 2019
Meet the Artists September 19, 5:30 - 7PM
The Mixed Media Work, Rising Heart

There are art works that are intentional, and others in which one simply applies intent on to an accidental finding.  Much of my work falls in to the latter category.  When I worked with found object mosaic assemblage, it was the object itself that was re-purposed into art. In recent years, due to space limitations, I often borrow objects that inspire art work .  Or in the case of the art work Rising Heart, find something, then give it away.

The mixed media work, Rising Heart, previously labeled Soaring, was the result of finding a peculiar piece of wood on my walk in a nearby park.  The piece of wood appeared to be a knot that had fallen off a tree.  I took the peculiarly shaped knot and placed it on a rock.  It bore an uncanny resemblance to a bird with its’ head tossed back and wings extended.  I took some photos then brought it back home to show my husband.

     “Why didn’t you just bring the piece back home?”  He asked.  I mumbled something about feeling that I was unworthy of it because it looked like something ethereal.  Fortunately, my husband convinced me to bring the piece back in order to study it more carefully.  I did and set the piece up in my sun room/photo studio to take some interesting shots.  These shots are of either side of the piece positioned on a rock.  I posted the photos on Facebook and they caught the attention of another artist, Tyrone Geter, who expressed interest in having this object after I finished with it.  I agreed, which meant now I had to do something with it before giving it up. 

I was inspired to paint loosely, with splattered ink and spontaneously rendered spots of oil pastels.  The bird in the painting rose off the rock, as if flying.  So I named it Soaring.  I then packed the wooden knot up and shipped it off to Tyrone, who claimed that there was something almost frightening about the intense look of this crying bird. 

I did not find the wooden knot frightening but felt something poignant and sad about the hole in its center, a hole that I retained in my drawing because it seemed a necessary part of this piece - the hollow in one’s heart.  Did it signify loss?  Freedom?  It did strike me at one point as being like a Buddhist relinquishing of earthly desires.  Yet despite this, I eventually did decide to fill that empty void in the bird’s chest.  I filled it with a stamped design after listening to an interview of a student activist survivor of the Tian An Men massacre of thirty years ago. 

For weeks I had been fearing this anniversary.  I recalled the anxiety I felt all those years ago as the students gathered in Tian An Men square in 1989.  I was in graduate school at the time at Parsons School of Design.  But I had come to New York from a previous life in the People’s Republic of China, where I had completed several years of study in Chinese art and language, two of those years at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art.  In 1989, the large Goddess of Democracy that was wheeling about the square, had been created by the sculpture department of that school.   
The terrible, bloody crackdown that followed the protests made me fear for the lives of people I might have known.  On television, I thought I saw two people I recognized, running away from bullets!  Two years later, after returning to China, and to my old alma mater, I did come across those two - they had survived!  My professors had survived as well.  And many of the students who I knew may have survived as well, since I knew them back in 1985.  But I will never know for certain and it always remained a hollow in my heart, as did the fact that in the early 1990's the old CAFA on Wang Fu Jing street was torn down and moved to a place on the outskirts of Beijing.  That remained something of a sentimental void as well - no old haunt to go back to - that scrappy old place around the corner from the Beijing Opera School.   Today, if you look on their website, of course there is no mention of the old location and of course no mention of the school’s involvement in the uprising of 1989 - it feels like a hole torn out of cultural and personal history.

It is 2019, and all those old activists of 1989 looked so much older in their interviews, which made me feel my age as well.  But there was one thing that an aged protester said in her interview that somehow gave me hope.  When asked if the risks and sacrifices made so many years ago were worth it, she replied “Yes.”  After hearing this,  I took up my carving tools and carved a little stamp out of soft linoleum.  I put red ink on it and stamped it onto the hollow space in the bird’s chest in my drawing.  It reads “heart.”