Inspired by the School of Art’s grants supporting travel-based research, our “On the Ground” series features research by graduate students, offering a glimpse into the contexts, processes, and methods of inquiry that drive their work beyond the studio. In this installment, Anne Chen reflects on encounters with another artist who shares her name — and the layered questions of identity, authorship, and meaning that arise.
Written by Anne Chen
“Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: no contradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject vs object. Its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, addressing, warping, and other forms relations.” —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling
I showed up to Dim Sum Palace with Veda and began picking out menu items, multiples of threes and fours, little duplicates sitting neatly on plates. I saw Anny approach from the door and as she got closer a bizarre coincidence was revealed. We both wore purple pinafores over white shirts. We exclaimed in surprise over the strangeness but I performed mine. Inside I felt of course, we were primed for it, and somehow I needed to quell what I expected would be a heightened awareness for commonalities to drive the meaning into this meeting. Positive feedback loops are self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling. I grow impatient with my adherence to skepticism and rationalism. It’s kind of boring, I would prefer to lose myself in the romanticism, the insertion of magic in everyday life. After all, I am studying to be an artist not a scientist. What business do I have in logical linearities? Why not give myself permission to be indulgent? To seek and steep every noticing in meaning. Moralistic tautologies aside, I want to give way to new forms of meaning making, interpretation, play, and not privilege the embodied Western knowledge I was raised up in. I’ve been experimenting with mysticism, and I’m dipping my toes by following the white rabbit of coincidence and chance. I don’t need to go full woo woo but it might be nice to relinquish a little control, like when I ask chatbots for prompts or check the YutLik calendar. I’m doing a little digital stargazing. After all, as Sedgwick says, it’s the “Middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual creativity and change.”
I could feel her anxiety, after all I solicited a window into her life and I think she was unsure how to perform our parallel lives. I reassured her, this grant was a scam, a trick, a trip to New York, a way for us to spend time together. A joke, I can’t pay myself so I’ll pay her, the next best thing. We are just hanging out. Fate brought us together so why not explore it. I don’t know if I play well with others. As a new-ish artist I’ve mostly given in to my impulse to take up all the space, collaborating in community organizing work but I’m hesitant to yield any control in my art practice. Am I easing in by collaborating with an artist by my name? Does sharing the same name mean we are free from authorship? Am I furthering Western ideals of my own replaceability? Is this another form of self-orientalizing for the institution? Fetishizing myself is one thing but am I reflecting that gaze onto the other Anny? Is this a glaring attempt to give the work “texxture” by cheaply imbuing it with our layered but shifting histories? Sedgwick is critical of this, “the narrative-performative density of the other kind of texxture its ineffaceable historicity – also becomes susceptible to a kind of fetish value. An example of the latter might occur where the question is one of exoticism, of the palpable and highly acquirable textural record of the cheap, precious work of many foreign hands in the light of many damaged foreign eyes. So, all of this for a good story? Still, I imagined us jealously negotiating the interior contents of each other’s boxes labeled ‘Anny.’ a tug-of-war over how it gets told. Veda exclaimed “Annys, look at this!” when trying to get our attention. When I am with her I am plural.
At the second ceramic studio (she works at four, we diverge here as I seriously lack her work ethic) Anny stood on a ladder handing me two closed form ceramic clouds and told me to choose one. I ran my fingers over the curves, turned one over and traced our name carved into its underside and placed it in my pocket. At the three studios I exclaimed in glee whenever I spotted shelves labeled in sharpie on tape with our name. She recounted the first time she was tagged in my work and how for a split second she wondered if she was in that show but forgot. She introduced me shyly over and over to her studio community and I quipped, “We’re trying to figure out who the evil twin is.” and I caught a whispered “doppelganger” as we walked into the glaze room from the women sitting at the tables.
We compared notes all day about our family, upbringing, dynamics with our older sisters. Her family owned Chinese restaurants, mine worked in academia.We made soft but urgent and probing inquiries at each other’s medical history, mental health, our ethics and political alignments. The last of which feeling somehow loaded, our more surface commonalities assumed familiarity but those allegiances could dictate whether or not she would want to spend any more time with me. I feel inappropriately maternal towards younger artists that I’m encountering. I can see them yearning for more community care, they’re paranoid about the ills of the world, they want to reveal every problem in service of finding solutions. I am wary of Foucault’s “negative relation,” of the reified hegemonic and subversive, being so reactive polarizes us, “evacuates it of substance,” (Sedgwick) it narrows our choices. I hear it and I don’t want to hear it. When I don’t know what to say I feign ignorance, I reach for flattery to hold their friendship.
After meandering through the city to three of four studios she works at, the air of forced familiarity hung absurdly like a low heavy haze as we, relative strangers, dawdled up to her apartment. She showed me into her bedroom, true in that it was mostly bed (NYC) and with padded cushions taken from the IKEA Kivik lining the walls, a move I approve of. She pulled out her sticker collection in a clear Ferrero Rocher box, the same kind that Veda and I had been snacking on all week, and this time I was so happy to see another coincidence. We giggled about how saving and repurposing that box was so Chinese-American culture far beyond the stylized cloud motifs that find their way into our artwork. We looked at art history books for the blind with simplified textured graphic illustrations of famous paintings and agreed over our love of touching art. Honestly, at this point the uncanniness paired with the intimacy became too much for me, and we agreed to take a break so I sat on the couch in the common area while she stayed in her room.
When we reconvened, we grabbed ceramic supplies and went up to the roof but it was too windy and we decided to leave it for another day. On the roof the conversation became more relaxed and frank. She insisted I take a mug from her very good shelf of homemade mugs, “Help me lighten my burden.” Very Chinese. At the end, she cautiously asked if I wanted a hug or if that was weird as if it were a barrier not meant to be crossed. I hugged her warmly. “Through its reciprocity, touch destabilizes agency, exposing the complex dependencies of subjects and objects” (Sedgwick).
Two days later on Wednesday I showed up to Bushwick Ceramics to make beads with Anny. We made nerikomi by mixing two clay bodies together, dividing and combining over and over until a pattern emerged. We drank tea, chatted and shaped the beads while making future plans for a trip where she could spend a week with me in Pittsburgh and I could teach her to quilt.