ANNY CHEN: ON THINNING ICE
Clay Art Center Gallery, June 23 - Aug 04, 2022
Anny Chen’s wheel-thrown and handbuilt ceramic stools are influenced by traditional Chinese craft practices and motifs central to the Chinese-American diaspora. Through her work, Anny questions what it means to belong to a family, a community, or a place, along with the entailing responsibilities attached to those relationships. She was born in New York, New York, and raised in Nowata, Oklahoma interspersed with visits to her ancestral home in Fuzhou, China. Anny holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has studied at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. While in residence at Clay Art Center this year, she has focused on how to best direct her climate anxiety into actions.
Artist Statement
"Throughout my work, clouds are a repeated motif. They have represented connection, tradition, belonging, home, family, an idealized landscape in an ever-changing environment…but I first drew them to feel connected to China through old Chinese pottery. While I sculpt, brush, scratch, and carve clouds into gourds and stools, I reconsider what my childhood could have been like had I grown up in China. Yet, this is a stilted imagining as I am an American-born Chinese who grew up in rural Oklahoma. Would I care so much about my roots if I had grown up surrounded by people who looked like me? My anxiety over home as a place pushes me to labor over “home” as a feeling—since I fear I do not quite belong even now.
With climate change intensifying and no real reform coming from lawmakers, my anxiety spikes while my sense of belonging wavers. I reference motifs and forms from China to romanticize a time period of a country I have no real connection to as an American. These complications of identity, place, and belonging in my work reveal a need to resist the trap of stagnant definitions as I figure out my role in America. Do I even want a home here? My work is a sandbox to figure out these questions and share these incomplete answers with my audience.”
Watch Anny Chen introduce “On Thinning Ice”
