Brendan Lee Satish Tang: Reluctant Offerings

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Brendan Lee Satish Tang, "Ford F-150," 2021

wood, watercolour on paper, lights, soundscape, 80.5" x 204" x 79"

Brendan Lee Satish Tang: Reluctant Offerings

Gallery Jones is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Brendan Lee Satish Tang. Reluctant Offerings expands on Tang’s earlier use of the Joss Paper tradition, a Chinese funerary custom that involves burning paper replicas of items a deceased loved one adored as gifts for the after-life. Previously, Tang has created playful Joss Paper pieces of items that populated his childhood: a Gameboy, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album, a VHS copy of the movie “They Call Me Bruce”, all presented in vitrines with a thoughtfully placed match, a symbol full of incendiary potential (although the “match” was a ceramic reproduction, more bluff than conviction). While the previous examination of these objects could be considered part of a natural process of adulthood, Tang’s new focus is the memory and experience of growing up as an immigrant and visible minority in a small Canadian city in the 80s, particularly Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted with a full-size, watercolour replica of a 1984 Ford F-150. The absurdity of the hulking frame, rendered beautifully with watercolour-painted paper panels, speaks to the alien nature of the whole experience, both first hand in the gallery, and as the memories evoked by this symbol sit in the artist’s mind. It’s impossible not to think there is a level of emotional devotion to those memories as well – what else could drive the impulse to recreate it this way? The flickering fire in the undercarriage, the suspended pine tree air fresheners and the campfire soundtrack all speak to the warmth of the emotional impetus for this show. Or the possibility of a fiery resolution once and for all.

Like much of Tang’s artist production before this exhibition, Reluctant Offerings celebrates hybridity. His ongoing Manga Ormolu series combines the Blue and White tradition of ceramics with Manga sensibility, and here we have a similar juxtaposition between the rituals of mourning in Chinese culture and symbols that evoke memories of alienation and assimilation. The hybridity here feels more personal however: there is an ever-present duality between the desire to expunge the past through fire or revere it through art.