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Ming Fay / Epoxy Art Group. From the series, The Decolonization of Hong Kong (1992). Courtesy of the artist and Asia Art Archive in America.
Exhibition
Art Across Archives: Postcards from Chinatown
17 Feb 2018 – 31 Mar 2018
Address
- 43 Remsen Street (Garden Floor)
- New York
New York - 11201
- United States
Art Across Archives re-constitutes the work of the EPOXY Art Group, a collective of artists hailing primarily from Hong Kong and China active in New York during the 1980s and ‘90s.
About
The group experimented with a variety of art forms, including installation, performance, slideshows, and zines, as a collaborative means of exploring and re-framing their cross-cultural experiences in the US.
The featured works, The Decolonization of Hong Kong (1992) and Thirty-Six Tactics (1987), are examples of a research-based approach to art-making. The artists sifted through mass media archives and used Xerox machines to compile their own unofficial histories of global events. Drawing upon resources as disparate as Reagan Era scandals, the Opium Wars, and classical Chinese military stratagems, these artworks piece together far-flung fragments of a world that has already happened. Traversing time and space, they gesture toward a past that both travels and evolves.
The EPOXY Art Group’s core members included Ming Fay (b. 1943), Bing Lee (b. 1948), Jerry Kwan (1934-2008), Kwok Mang Ho (b. 1947), Kang Lok Chung (b. 1947), and Eric Chan (b. 1975), with Esther Liu, and Cissy Pao (b. 1950), Andrew Culver (b. 1953), and Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) as additional participants. The exhibit includes an archival wall with modules addressing Epoxy’s work as a collaborative group, the significance of downtown New York to their work, and the slideshow as an innovative, hand-drawn medium.
Art Across Archives draws material from three New York collections: the Asian American Arts Centre, the Asia Art Archive in America, and selections by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU of materials from the Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU. Slideshows featuring each collection will be on view 24/7 in the window of 384 Broadway and as a projection indoors. In opening up these archives to fresh perspectives, this exhibition asks us to rethink the archive as a space for play and a source for new ideas in the community.
