PASTEL DIASPORA & GINGHAM STATEMENT
Pastel Diaspora is located at the improbable intersection of imperialism, interior decoration and high school. This work is concerned with cultural imperialism as well as imperialism in its more traditional, historical sense.
Pastel Diaspora continues my exploration of 1/4" blue and white checked gingham as a ubiquitous icon of wholesome, nostalgic “American” culture. My old gingham prep school uniform has long been a personal symbol of my adolescent trials as a nerdy Chinese girl among sophisticated white debutantes. More than that, gingham is a window into the bigger societal and cultural forces that shaped those miserably uniformed teen years: racial isolation and desegregation, constructs of upper middle class femininity, “taste”and control. Gingham (with its invisiblized historical roots in the colonial Asian textile trade) pretends well to egalitarianism, although it really belongs to the “traditional” aesthetic of understated, secure privilege and staid entitlement. Martha Stewart loves gingham; so does J. Crew. Americans of all classes are supposed to find comfort and safety in innocent gingham.
The white linen pillow is a close relative of gingham, but with perhaps a more overt agenda—it is obviously luxurious and “tasteful”, a symbol of cleanliness, purity and leisure with an old British imperialist flavor. Pastel Diaspora’s wall of these large pillows is populated with thousands of pins, each carrying a tiny gingham folio. (A folio is simply any sheet or flat plane folded in half to form four pages, and is the bare minimum element commonly understood to constitute a book in the “Western” tradition.) On the curved terrain of the pillows, pin/folio units cluster to suggest populations, colonies, migration patterns, boundaries, territories and conquest or spheres of influence. Parallel referents on a different scale would be social groupings, cliques, neighborhoods, segregation and class boundaries. The folios throw book-shaped shadows on the white surface, books in this case suggesting the dissemination or imposition of ideas, culture or ideology.
I created this piece at the height of dot-com decadence in 1999, with my focus on the most mundane manifestations of cultural imperialism in contemporary corporate form. Rapid gentrification had generated an endless mushrooming of gift shops that all seemed to sell the same decorative pillows, scented soaps, and selfconsciously styled picture frames; the violence of displacement, relocation and (re)segregation appeared to wear a very genteel face in that moment. With the current resurgence of overt, old-school warring imperialism and accompanying domestic repression, I feel that the malevolence lurking behind Pastel Diaspora’s pretty surface has emerged clearer and more pointed.
