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LORENE TAUREREWA
Drawing, 24 Aug - 24 Sept 2006
For Lorene Taurerewa, Chinese visual art has become the medium to explore the paths back to an original source. “I have always had a deep interest in my own family history, (Samoan/Chinese) which informs my work from a base of intimate knowledge. My Chinese lineage can only be traced four generations back and then is lost for all time. The only way ‘forward’ as I could see was to study their art forms”. She acknowledges her Chinese heritage as the main source of inspiration for her most recent work, large scale figurative drawings, which, through the conventionality of the portrait, emerge into visibility to remind us of the unavoidable and necessary work of inheritance and her/our relationship to the lost ancestor other.
Acknowledging a need to see the art first hand, Lorene researched traditional Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This involved studying and drawing from their collection, one of the largest collections of Asian art in the world. “Just after I arrived a fantastic new exhibition of Chinese ancestor portraits went up. Along with Chinese mark making concepts I was specifically interested in ancestor portraiture. Every day I would go to the Met to draw and found myself studying the postures intently as the nuances of the human gestures in their arts are very subtle and communicate on many levels. For instance, in Chinese tradition, portraiture is a portrait not of the individual, but of the immortal. A portrait does not present a view of an individual as if through the eyes of someone sharing a place in time with the sitter, as in traditional western portraiture. Instead, Chinese portraits are venerated as encapsulations of the ancestor; they are a collective view of what the outward form of the figure shows of something much more enduring and unchangeable, namely that which walks through the family lines from generation to generation.
The main body of Lorene’s work has been painting but since returning from New York she has concentrated on drawing as the medium to lessen the ‘gap’ the spatial barriers between viewer and maker. The scale and execution of her drawings have effectively allowed her to draw attention to its conspicuously marked surfaces and encourages the possibility of being read as a trace of the artists hand, a way of ‘embodying’ the artist and drawing attention to the body of the spectator. Traditional Chinese mark making concepts evoke the illusion of presence and empathy: a trace of the movement of the artists hand ‘the mark’ is liable to bring awareness of the artist as an embodied being, of the process (the duration) of drawing, and of the space of the work’s making (that is, the space in front of the drawing as opposed to the space ‘within’ it). Consequently, Chinese drawing tradition holds that the drawer and the viewer inhabit the same world, on this side of the paper. There is no belief, as there is in western tradition, in the possible reality of the illusioned - that you can enter a 2D space imaginatively. The drawing is not a window to another world, but an empathy space where the drawer and the viewer come together in the contemplation and commemoration of a fact. In this instance, the fact is the 2-sided coin – on the one side the fleetingness of time, action, mark in time; and on the other the continuity of family, the immortality of ancestry.
The drawings exhibited in this show are part of the series Journey of 1000 miles. |
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