Ciara McNamara, Artist Programs intern at TAC, got together with current AIR 16 resident Fay Ku:
Ciara: Can you tell me a little bit about your work?
Fay: Sure. My practice has always been based in drawing, for the past 20 years at least. A couple years ago I started a printmaking residency, which is something I've done before. I had done printmaking before, but during the residency, I felt totally immersed in it. I felt that it rewired my brain and made me approach drawing in a completely different way, opening up my practice.
When I first came to the Textile Arts Center, I was a novice. I had very little knowledge of it, but I was just eager to learn and gain a new material intelligence.
Ciara: What does your work mean to you conceptually? And what are some of your largest artistic and historical influences?
Fay: I come from a family of storytellers. In the end, almost everything I do is grounded in storytelling, figuration, and narratives. My upbringing has definitely been the biggest influence on my work. I was born in Taiwan, and came to America when I was very young. My family grew up in communities where no one looked like us, but in this strange in-between where we still spoke Mandarin and ate Chinese food. They always impressed upon me that my “real culture” was my Taiwanese-Chinese culture, which existed within my upbringing in America without any visual references.
I always had all these stories and images floating around in my imagination. My work is an outcome of that feeling. Many of these stories are not necessarily biographical, but rather informed by things I am thinking about, always with a story form. I am always creating through my reflection of art history, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. I love thinking about civilizations and the projects of civilization.
Ciara: What are some recent projects you have been working on, and how have they informed the transition into starting your residency at the Textile Arts Center?
Fay: I did a Jade Warrior series, where I incorporated embroidery into the drawn jade tiles that made up these outfits. The jade armor was really inspired by these ancient burial jade suits crossed with acrobat circus performers. The jade suits that are meant for the dead but they're coming apart at the seams which combines my love of history and putting all these different ideas together. I have never been interested in the modeling of the Western figures, or creating a believable mimetic visual representation of spatial reality. I do not care for depicting three dimensional space, but rather obtaining a graphic sensibility lending myself to patterns. So, when I include backgrounds, they tend to be flat and graphic. There is always a kind of patterning, which is very related to textile arts. My work has always been textile adjacent.
Ciara: Could you speak more to these Jade tiles and the element of these women existing as warriors in armor?
Fay: I remember back around 2017, there was this great show at the Met, showcasing 2,000 years of Chinese art. I first came across the jade burial suits about ten years earlier. During the Han Dynasty, royalty would be buried in little bits of jade, which are placed all together over the body to create a kind of beautiful armor.
I have always had a lot of hunting motifs in my life. My Western horoscope sign is Virgo, which growing up I always felt like, oh God, who wants to be a virgin? But as I got older I found that Artemis, Diana, is a hunter. I was also born in the year of the tiger, in the evening, so my family would always tell me I was a tiger going out to hunt. Additionally, I was born with a mole between my eyes…, when you have a mole between your eyes, your eyeballs are like two phoenixes closing in on a prey. I guess with all these hunting motifs a part of me felt like I was a hunter at heart, or some kind of warrior. It is something that is always lingering in the back of my mind.
Ciara: I find it fascinating that you compare Western and Eastern histories of perspective, and what that all means in the context of your art.
Fay: Two-point perspective never really made sense for me in my art. My figures don’t need to be in that space. It only exists, but it isn’t real. It only looks real because you are trained to think, oh, this looks real, but it’s only real if your body doesn’t exist because you can’t exist in time and space. As you begin to move, the whole thing gets destroyed. Mechanical engineers and other cultures historically don’t use this visual strategy, they use other visual strategies such as axonometric constructions.
Tying in language, in Mandarin, there are no tenses besides the present tense. If you want to say, I’m going to go to the supermarket, you would say, I go to supermarket. You do not know if you went yesterday, tomorrow or today. Instead, you would have to say I go to supermarket yesterday. You rely upon the world, moving through time and space. It’s a highly contextual language. It informs the difference of perspective within drawing because you exist as a body in space through time. Like Mechanical engineers' drawings, parallel constructions, they do not go into a vanishing point. It is the least amount of distortion because it's similar to the way a body experiences three-dimensional space.
Ciara: The first part of your residency at TAC is experimentation-oriented, what have you been playing around with?
Fay: I have been super excited about taking all the classes and workshops. (I think I have taken a bit too many classes because I haven't had time to really practice and develop one textile technique.) I am focused on skill building and have been reflecting a ton about what it means to be a drawer, as well as a printmaker. For me, the definition of drawing is that of all the plastic arts, it's the most direct transmission of an idea or concept onto a surface. The drawing itself is almost as if it is disembodied, or something unfolding. I have been incorporating embroidery into my work which I have found as a new form of drawing. you are moving a line through space, and by connecting two things to one another.
With printmaking, I was grappling with the neatness of its process, feeling slightly intimidated since I am not really a neat person. I read Jennifer L. Roberts, she did this wonderful lecture series about how a print is a body (the matrix) coming into contact with another body (the paper). They meet in one unique recorded event, outside the visual realm, the moment of physical contact. Then there is a pull, where you reveal the print, and there is always the pending element of surprise.
Ciara: Do you have any directions you would like to go in for the rest of your time at the Textile Arts Center?
Fay: I plan to really immerse myself in it and see where my brain takes me. I used to teach young kids at public schools through the nonprofit program, Studio In School. My favorite age was three to five years old.
Ciara: That’s a great age, all the art they are creating is so new, they have never done it before.
Fay: Once, we were teaching the preschoolers how to do collage; how to cut shapes and glue them to make animals. this one kid was cutting all these circles and making a tail. He was so excited as he began gluing the circles down one after the other, that he completely went off his paper. He just kept gluing the tails on and on and on. He didn’t know he wasn’t ‘supposed’ to go off the paper, but he didn’t care at all. It was just amazing. I want to be like that kid, just organically let my process flow.
Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose works on paper are figurative, psychological and narrative.
About the AIR program:
TAC AIR combines studio access with a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, and regular critical dialogue, providing residents an opportunity to learn and explore the textile medium, and an alternative to traditional higher education programs. The residency culminates in a group exhibition produced and hosted by TAC. Since 2010, TAC AIR has graduated over 100 artists and designers whose work continues to further textile art within the fashion, fine arts, design and art education fields.
Apply for AIR Cycle 17 HERE