À côté de la maison de Maura et Eric, qui m’accueillent pour cette semaine à Chicago (Morgan Park dans la proche banlieue), jolie exposition au Berverly Art Center de Larry Lee : « The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated » (commissariat de Susannah Papish). Avec ses installations et objets, Larry Lee se joue des clichés de ses origines et de « l’orientalisation d’une culture » dans un discours public ou privé.
Je copie ici son artist statement :
« My work remakes high/low culture as multimedia “orientaliaâ€, stylized reproductions of cultural objects, images and actions that fit a stereotype, perspective or aesthetic often associated with anything Asian which explores how the production of culture and its byproducts constructs and typecasts the discourse of Self versus Other by reinventing or reinterpreting what is accepted cultural capital as private/public record with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
So far, this approach vacillates between video installations usually of the multiple-channel variety, conceptual projects and sculptural objects. The video works play with autobiographical moments decontextualized and isolated as solitary exercises of specific physical movements that become ritualized as the result of repeated performance affecting the formal properties related to the spatial and temporal to humorous effect whereas the conceptual projects tend to question the nature and definition of the artistic process itself, the primacy of the autonomous individual and related issues pertaining to validations of what is authentic or original utilizing curatorial practice as a strategy of alternative display through community and collaboration within the politics of the room.
A sardonic appreciation of chinoiserie informs the three-dimensional objects and installations which typically explore ethnic-specific and cultural issues of voicing the other through the basic sculptural questions of form, material and space regurgitated oftentimes as minimalist design. Such recognizably Asian things function to embrace Western notions of beauty and form that affect how the relationship of design and culture intersect, the juncture gridlocked by the gravitational forces of modernism and its cultural imperative to universalize its nature and pigeonhole its style or perception ».