Interview with Kirk Ke Wang

Kirk Ke Wang’s Snow in September is an exhibition of abstract, mixed-media paintings based on images from the September 11th, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. The title of the show refers to a play from China’s Yuan Dynasty about injustice where a woman is wrongfully sentenced to death for an offense she didn’t commit. Wang makes a correlation between the martyred woman in the play and the thousands of innocent people who lost their lives on 9/11, as well as the millions of lives affected by the tragedy.

Wang’s creative process for this series includes sourcing images of  9/11 and painting them as the base layers. Viewers can see photos of the process by scanning a QR code presented on the wall of the gallery. He then paints over those abstractions, and adheres bits of white fabric to the painting’s surface. The pieces of white fabric embody the lives of the people who were lost that day.

Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Wang witnessed his grandfather’s business be taken over by the government. His family was then sent to a labor camp. As a child in the labor camp, Wang was surrounded by many of the artists, academics, and free-thinkers of the time. It was there that he learned to be an artist.

When he got out of the labor camp, as a teenager, Wang was so advanced in the arts that he was offered admission into the exclusive Nanjing Normal University, where he received his first MFA. He then received an exchange scholarship to study in the U.S., which led him to the University of South Florida, where he received his second MFA. Now, he’s a full-time faculty member at Eckerd College’s Visual and Interdisciplinary Arts Department, and his art is exhibited locally and internationally.

Kirk Ke Wang: Everything comes to ruins. We start as dust and we return to dust. It doesn’t matter how great society is; eventually, it’s going to be in ruin. That’s just my very pessimistic view. Growing up, I saw ruins from destroyed people, society, status, personally, materially.

I was at my residence in New York City when Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery Director, Amanda J. Poss, contacted me and offered me a solo exhibition. I’ve looked at the list of the artists who have shown there, and I feel honored to be included on that list. It was raining the whole time we were in New York. But when I got the call, that day, it brightened up. It got sunny. So, my wife and I walked around the city, and went down to lower Manhattan, by the 9/11 memorial—she has a Master’s Degree in Literature and Critique—and we were discussing the drama and tragedy of 9/11. A lot of my work deals with tragedy.

My previous series called Human Skins was basically about environmental devastation that causes pollution, drought, tsunamis, and human suffering. I read a book called The Uninhabitable Earth, which is about how all the world’s troubles, like political-social wars, are coming from environmental issues because the resources are limited, and there’s conflicts over them. In war, there’s debris, so, for the Human Skins series, I was collecting clothes from immigrants—like myself—and I included the clothes in the paintings. The Salvation Army even put a box in front of my studio because I didn’t use all the clothes that were donated to me. Our clothes are our social skins, which are transferable from one social situation to another. They carry us.

I’m also really fed up with so-called “Zombie Formalism.” That’s why I made the Human Skins series look Bauhaus-style, pretty, designed—just like something you’d learn in class—and it became my critique of rehashing old ideas disguised as something new. I want people to pull back from that.

In my work, art is never, “What you see is what you get.” The art I want to make is, “What you see may not be what you want to get.” It looks pretty, but it's about tragedy.

For Snow in September, I was looking at the images of the buildings falling on 9/11. When they were coming down, it looked like snow because of all the dust. While my wife and I were at the memorial, she reminded me about the Chinese tragedy from the Yuan Dynasty, Snow in Hot Summer. In that play, a woman is framed and sentenced to death, but nobody can prevent it. Once she’s executed, which is in the month of June, it snows. The snow serves as a metaphor for heaven, the spirit, intervening to show humans the crime they did to her. It’s not her crime. It’s unjust. So, it snowed in the summer. On 9/11, over two-thousand people died. They were innocent.

Tom Winchester: When you get close to the paintings, you can see that there are pieces of clothes adhered to the surface. A few have the embroidery, buttons, and the tags very conspicuously placed. But from afar, you wouldn’t notice that they’re clothes instead of white paint. Unlike the Human Skins series, which contained very colorful clothes and pieces of fabric in them, the paintings for Snow in September contain only white fabric elements.

KW: That’s the difference from the other ones, which were very colorful. These contain only white elements. It’s a reference to Asian culture. In Western culture, you wear white at weddings. In Asian culture, traditionally, you wear red to weddings. The one occasion where people wear white is at a funeral, mourning.

In the photos from 9/11, there were lots of white shirts falling from the rubble, coming down. The chefs, the office workers, it represents them.

My work is informed by my trauma, and my parents’ trauma, in China, when I was young, during the Cultural Revolution. My parents were beaten up by the Red Guards. We were sent to the countryside, in the labor camp. All of these things affect how I see the world and the art I create. I still see the beauty in life. If you go to the opera, you see a tragedy, but it’s beautiful. So, these paintings actually aren’t that sad: they’re hopeful.

TW: The way that you use the clothes accentuates art’s arbitrary relation to value.  

KW: There’s a transformation from one life to the other, which is a process of recycling and repurposing. They started for a specific function, but that was totally different from becoming an artwork. Just like I transformed digital images of 9/11 into paintings early in the process, I’m transforming these pre-owned garments, many of which were expensive brand names bought second-hand at thrift stores, into an artwork representing the intertwined nature of our societies. Different from our natural skins, those used clothes are our social skins.

TW: There aren’t many recognizable shapes in this series, and the color palette you use is very nuanced.

KW: They start as complex photographic images, then they develop into Pop-art paintings, and then into abstracted layers. I try to reduce them to their core. They go from complexity to refinement. It’s like DNA: it’s very complex, but it’s made of combinations of just a few chromosomes.