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Bound in black cloth it looms leafless, as if charred by fire, yet paradoxically bears strange fruit. Small cylindrical bundles of black felt dangle just out of easy reach. Higher still, five suspended disks slowly rotate, like a Calder mobile, ‘moons’ mirrored on one side to reflect projected video images of Asian male faces. These are strangely contorted into mask-like grimaces, straining towards a dangling object resembling the bundles on the tree. The projection of the black and white image in negative produces an estrangement of the distorted features that border on racial caricature, dehumanized, while the flickering tongues and gaping mouths are disturbingly voracious and sexual, exhibiting a grotesque desire.
As the moons rotate, the mirror sides send these demons circuiting the room while the dark sides throw shadows – a virtual lunar eclipse. The reverberating vocals and bells on the soundtrack are subtly ominous. Another video projection silhouettes black branches against the adjacent wall. Repeatedly, a lit match caresses the wall/screen like a skin – then expires, momentarily keeping the forces of darkness at bay. Still another video flickers firelight from deep within a tunnel into the wall. The viewer must sit on the floor, just like the nude figure of Pien in the video. Visible from the neck down, Pien assumes various positions around a candle, producing a body sculpture that recalls the tenebrism of Georges de la Tour as the candle is alternately revealed and eclipsed - a hollowed out space of introspective intimacy.
Powerfully evoking a cosmology of dark and light, fear and hope, Pien’s installation is sensuous and richly metaphorical without engaging specific narratives. The indeterminacy of Pien’s haunting, its obsessive and relentless quality, approaches a phenomenology of postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to characterize the experience of those dominated by the narratives of previous generations “shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.” It is, according to Hirsch, “a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated, not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”
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