Answer Collecting
Pamela Yu-Han Sun
July 20, 2021- August 20, 2021
Checklist
Forget the Object: Notes on Answer Collecting
As the inaugural exhibition at 373 Broadway, P.Bibeau is pleased to present Answer Collecting, a solo exhibition by Pamela Yu-Han Sun.
In the tradition of asemic writing Yu-Han Sun focuses on the gesture behind mark making, an act using a stream of consciousness produced through meditation to consider how ‘the gesture configures form as a site of struggle’.
The non-specificity of the words and format in each work were created during a time of poor health and cramped living conditions in a San Francisco SRO (single room occupancy) during the earliest days of the pandemic. Yu-Han Sun spent days watching YouTube videos on conspiracy theories and contradictions between modern and ancient medicines, all in search and support of reasons for life and death.
During this time of isolation Yu-Han Sun came to the conclusion that meditation, combined with repetition of hand movements, guided her toward abstraction, resulting in the works seen in Answer Collecting. With a primary interest in using materials that are easily attainable in daily life, Yu-Han Sun works on paper in mass circulation, (as luck would have it, Ikea assembly manuals), to support and record her stream of consciousness written in both Mandarin and English.
Set against the bare utility of instruction manuals are visual cycles of Yu-Han Sun's mental algorithms. In natural opposition to the open-ended meditation seen in the works, Ikea assembly manuals, presented as 'foolproof', are human-created instructions that often do not work out in the desired manner. The use of the instruction manuals for Yu-Han Sun’s purpose highlights a specific intuition set against a purposeful cognitive design considered a confident tool for the transmission of knowledge.
The turn to the self regards a history in art making that negates the pressure of the external world- a surface invention in play - that insists on attention, reaction, relay, and immediacy. One's internal narrative is separate from that frequency, a realm where the mind works toward clarity of condition, a move away from constructs that heavily depend on the often invisible (unseen or unknown) advantage of someone's agenda through history and philosophy, communicating the ends of control.
As a break from cultural production models that apply a didactic expression (value signaling), or act as a mirror (merging), Yu-Han Sun presents a resistance to conclusions, as these are not resolved objects. There are no conclusions sought or drawn from Yu-Han Sun’s production. Instead, the works in Answer Collecting move beyond the formal and are meant as living documents. As legible as some words or phrases may be they are meant to be meaningless gestures, abstracted from place and time. The energy behind the mark making is what is on view, a ‘suspension of formal ends’.
Pamela Yu-Han Sun lives and works in Taiwan and San Francisco, CA. She received an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2021. Answer Collecting is Yu-Han Sun’s first formal exhibition.
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Excerpts: Paloma Yannakakis, INSUBORDINATE GESTURES AND THE ENDS OF LIFE: THE AESTHETICS OF GESTURE IN HENRI MICHAUX, CÉSAR VALLEJO, AND DIAMELA ELTIT, (Cornell University, New York, 2014)
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Pamela Yu-Han Sun
July 20, 2021- August 20, 2021
Checklist
Forget the Object: Notes on Answer Collecting
As the inaugural exhibition at 373 Broadway, P.Bibeau is pleased to present Answer Collecting, a solo exhibition by Pamela Yu-Han Sun.
In the tradition of asemic writing Yu-Han Sun focuses on the gesture behind mark making, an act using a stream of consciousness produced through meditation to consider how ‘the gesture configures form as a site of struggle’.
The non-specificity of the words and format in each work were created during a time of poor health and cramped living conditions in a San Francisco SRO (single room occupancy) during the earliest days of the pandemic. Yu-Han Sun spent days watching YouTube videos on conspiracy theories and contradictions between modern and ancient medicines, all in search and support of reasons for life and death.
During this time of isolation Yu-Han Sun came to the conclusion that meditation, combined with repetition of hand movements, guided her toward abstraction, resulting in the works seen in Answer Collecting. With a primary interest in using materials that are easily attainable in daily life, Yu-Han Sun works on paper in mass circulation, (as luck would have it, Ikea assembly manuals), to support and record her stream of consciousness written in both Mandarin and English.
Set against the bare utility of instruction manuals are visual cycles of Yu-Han Sun's mental algorithms. In natural opposition to the open-ended meditation seen in the works, Ikea assembly manuals, presented as 'foolproof', are human-created instructions that often do not work out in the desired manner. The use of the instruction manuals for Yu-Han Sun’s purpose highlights a specific intuition set against a purposeful cognitive design considered a confident tool for the transmission of knowledge.
The turn to the self regards a history in art making that negates the pressure of the external world- a surface invention in play - that insists on attention, reaction, relay, and immediacy. One's internal narrative is separate from that frequency, a realm where the mind works toward clarity of condition, a move away from constructs that heavily depend on the often invisible (unseen or unknown) advantage of someone's agenda through history and philosophy, communicating the ends of control.
As a break from cultural production models that apply a didactic expression (value signaling), or act as a mirror (merging), Yu-Han Sun presents a resistance to conclusions, as these are not resolved objects. There are no conclusions sought or drawn from Yu-Han Sun’s production. Instead, the works in Answer Collecting move beyond the formal and are meant as living documents. As legible as some words or phrases may be they are meant to be meaningless gestures, abstracted from place and time. The energy behind the mark making is what is on view, a ‘suspension of formal ends’.
Pamela Yu-Han Sun lives and works in Taiwan and San Francisco, CA. She received an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2021. Answer Collecting is Yu-Han Sun’s first formal exhibition.
_______________________
Excerpts: Paloma Yannakakis, INSUBORDINATE GESTURES AND THE ENDS OF LIFE: THE AESTHETICS OF GESTURE IN HENRI MICHAUX, CÉSAR VALLEJO, AND DIAMELA ELTIT, (Cornell University, New York, 2014)
