ALICE GONG XIAOWEN
For Alice Gong Xiaowen, translation is both method and subject. The ephemeral becomes solid. Light becomes heft. The lowly hallowed. Memory becomes matter. The familiar becomes alien and the domestic industrial. Bodies become texts. She casts dough, pinched with the seams of the dumpling wrappers her grandmother taught her to make, into steel, itself made from pig iron through a process of chemical translation—literalizing the ingots they symbolize. And she does so in the American mills where men once manufactured steel for the railroads before the production was offshored to China—two nations she is from but neither to which she belongs. The resulting figures emerge like entrails freshly excised—the kind that used to be steamed and read—their pinches now sutures straining to hold the impossible together.
They say: Much is lost in translation. Other things are gained. And yet others are, like Gong Xiaowen, caught in between—neither this nor that, here nor there, us nor them.
–Robert Morris Levine
Alice Gong Xiaowen, (Canadian b.1994, Beijing, China) is an artist and curator based in New York. Her thoughts linger on the conceptual connotations of matter, once translated and interpreted as material culture. She writes occasionally and hosts Room482, an apartment run exhibition space dedicated to fostering community convening around art in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. She has contributed to exhibitions such as Items: Is Fashion Modern? as part of the curatorial Architecture and Design team at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and to the design of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum. An alumni artist in residence at Autodesk Pier 9 in San Francisco, her work has also been shown internationally in galleries such as Rossana Orlandi (Milan, Italy) and DUPLEX (New York, NY). Gong Xiaowen has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alice Gong Xiaowen
IMAGES BY FUJIO EMURA