HALF

EXCERPT:

“Tendrils of cobalt floral patterning swirl across the delicate surface of a powder puff, abruptly ending, demarcating the halfway, the meeting point of its mirror powder puff mate, in stark porcelain white. The familiar form of the cosmetic applicator evokes associations of idealized Western beauty and the feminine restraint characterized by euphemisms like powdering one’s nose. Upon closer inspection, however, the familiarity of the forms is disrupted. The finely rendered handles take the form of tendinous chicken feet and the fibrous puffs are composed of wound human hair sourced from each of the artist’s parents, one who is Chinese and the other who is American. This sculpture, Half (p. 35), by Jennifer Ling Datchuk, not only physically embodies her genetic and cultural identities, but it also emblematizes the critical consideration of materiality and historiography that are central to the construction of meaning in her work.

Datchuk mines the loaded histories, cross-cultural significance, symbolic dualities, and provenance of her materials. It is her stewardship and scholarship of those material-histories that allows her to bring forth and enact charged objects and agents of critical discourse, camaraderie, and disruption. Half relates the bodily extensions of her Chinese American identity, expressed through threads of human hair, to the globalized politics of both the porcelain trade and the commercial beauty industry. Blue and white porcelain is the most recognized ceramic production in the world, with traditions in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Its rich material history of exchange, appropriation, and re-appropriation parallels the contemporary exchange of hair in the global beauty industry. Datchuk wields the symbolic values of her references and materials to bring efficacy to the conceptual foundations of her work.

The cultivated material knowledge she applies stems from her traditional training in ceramics, fiber, and artisanship. Porcelain allows Datchuk to communicate dualities; it is fragile yet vitreous, opaque yet translucent. In the earliest Western accounts of porcelain, it was described as a “fifth element,” a material unlike any encountered before, “of a middle nature between earth and glass, semipellucid.” This liminal material nature lends itself to expressing the binaries and constructs of her own identity. The complex historiography of ceramic is outlined by design historian Paul Greenhalgh, “Ceramic has no historiography because it has too many histories. Ceramic has no history because it has too much past... Ceramic appears nowhere in the ‘Story of Art’ because it appears everywhere in life.” Composed of kaolin, a white clay sourced from Jingdezhen, China, and petuntse stone, Datchuk’s chosen clay body references her Chinese heritage while also representing the desire for purity and whiteness (in material and beauty) that made it at one time more valuable than gold.

Blue and white decorative motifs are another complex material embodiment of globalization. Cobalt glaze on porcelain originated in the Persian pottery of Kashan and was studied and controlled over time in Jingdezhen. Centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, the technology of transfer printing was established, allowing makers to reproduce decorative motifs with a printing press, replacing the laborious hand-painted cobalt glaze motifs that preceded them. One of the first blue and white transfer motifs was the Willow Pattern, which was marketed as Chinese, but was designed by the English who appropriated Chinese painted decoration.

In Basic Bitch and Money Honey (pp. 80–81), Datchuk brilliantly overlays this material history of globalization and appropriation onto a contemporary praxis of nail art, social media, and salon culture. She uses blue and white transfer decals from Jingdezhen as the interior settings of oversized porcelain bar rings foregrounding reclaimed phrases and symbols, referencing bling jewelry and espousing empowerment. Similarly, in her collaboration with GLAZE Nail Lounge San Antonio, blue acrylic nails decorated with gold leaf and intricate white patterns sealed in varnish connote a layered history of cultural appropriation that, like globalized porcelain, often goes unattributed.”