Year: 2020
Medium: sculpture and photography | silicon, pigment, piano finish taper wood base, metal print (dye-sublimation printing on aluminum)
Dimension: approx. 6 x 6 x 4½ in, including the base (sculpture), 11 x 17 in each (photography)

Fingerprints is a silicone sculpture that captures an imprint of my hand in an aim to reflect unrest in response to immigration and racism.

My name, 林嘉貞, was left behind in my native country of Taiwan the moment I entered the U.S. Customs and Border Protection building. I immediately became another person once I entered U.S. territory. In the U.S., I insisted on not having an easy-to-pronounce English name; instead, I kept my translated name, Jia-Jen Lin—which, however, has often been recognized to be Chinese due to the pinyin system I chose to use 19 years ago. Having my fingerprints taken at Customs represents my knowledge that I will always have to press my fingers harder; otherwise, the immigration system will not recognize me as a legal immigrant who has become an American citizen through naturalization.


Fingerprints

Year: 2016
Medium: installation | stainless steel fence, C-print(or metal print), paint, wooden pedestal, frame, accessories, live performance.
Dimension: variable (entire installation), 30 x 30 x 56 in (sculpture), 30 x 20 in (photograph), 40 min (performance)

As part of Manufracture Series, I continue to investigate the segregated—yet inseparable—relationships between manufacturing and art making. I collaborated with a local fabrication shop to customize a personal security fence made of stainless steel fence commonly used for homes in Queens and Brooklyn. I then invited artist Colby Cannon Welsh, working as both and artist and laborer, to perform during the opening of my exhibition Bread, Steel, and Benjamin Moore. During the performance, he painted the wall into the same shade of blue as the pedestal that he painted earlier. I use this blue color to reference to one of the background tones we often see in the museums when classical paintings or objects of baroque style are on exhibit. Throughout the process, I reposition common goods into high-end artwork and portray it in a photograph as a classical masterpiece in a museum.

Manufracture: Personal Security Fence

Year: 2019
Medium: installation | billboard printing on vinyl, wood
Dimension: 210 x 159 x 15 in each, two pieces in total (approx. 730 x 159 x 15 in on the site)
Location: Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York

As part of my ongoing Manufracture Series, I continue to investigate the relationship between artmaking and manufacturing. In one of the large diptych billboard images, I overlap a picture of my father spraying blue paint onto a sheet of bonded leather for my art project with a photograph of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s artwork Venus of the Rags(1967). The other billboard image represents the grading color my father was spray-painting for my art project. The word “GRADIENT” merges with the background and becomes part of the image. By blurring the lines between intellectualism and craftsmanship and those between the knowledge of skills and the practice of skills, I pose an open question regarding the contradiction of the artist’s social status and how isolated contemporary art still is today.

As a daughter of a former bonded leather factory manufacturer, and an artist myself, I understand the important roles both manufacturers and artists play in our society. From Renaissance, Art Povera, to Duchampian art, artists have eventually been able to reclaim themselves as intellectuals. Until now, artists have been able to circulate themselves in the middle and upper classes. Yet, within their own close sector, artists still face repressions from the working class, and artists in general still cannot cross the gap to share their art with the majority of working-class people. With an overwhelming number of artists mostly produced by art schools, most emerging artists still have to join the labor workforce in order to sustain their artistic practice.

The Gradient was part of When Artists Enter the Factories, a large-scale indoor and outdoor group exhibition I curated at the Brooklyn Army Terminal launched during the 2019 Open House New York. For more information, please visit our Facebook Page.

This project is sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Additional support and fabrication by Vendome Exhibits. Special thanks to Special thank to Christophe Chaponot and Dave Aneiro and whoever came to give me a hand during the installation.

The Gradient

Year: 2020
Medium: sculpture | resin and pigment
Dimension: 17 ½ x 11⅜ x 5¾ in

The Invisible Asians series probes into recent anti-Asian hate crimes and the underestimated history of Asian Americans in the US.

This sculpture encapsulates the moment in 2020 when an Asian woman in Brooklyn was attacked with acid due to anti-Asian sentiment resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The bloody-colored and deformed foot, featuring exploded root-like tissue on the heel, alludes to the victim’s pain as she tumbled and tried to crawl back to her front steps.

The distorted foot lies on a tilted base that represents a blank tombstone half-buried in the ground. The female Asian victim, who is the same age as me, has suffered chemical burns on her face, neck, and back. The police have not yet found the assailant.


The Invisible Asians: An Acid Attack in Front of Her Own Residence

Year: 2020
Medium: photography | digital print
Dimension: variable

This series of photographs captures a flesh-like silicone piece symbolizing the Asian American figure and posed around a white marble pedestal. The series explores the complexity of solidarity and racism between Asian Americans and Black Americans through the background of the Black Lives Matter movement. In these silent images, this abstract figure uses its thin but persistent physical action to push, occupy, and stand with its back against a white marble pedestal, which is usually used for colonial statues. Its face is blurry and stays anonymous to reflect how Asian Americans have not been acknowledged in American history and how racism against Asian Americans has also been ignored.

While transitioning my identity from an Asian immigrant to an Asian American since 2019, I have learned that I am not able to escape racism. I have thus had no choice but to join the protests and the reckoning of racism’s present and past in this country.