cfile.library | Learn Paul Mathieu’s Hands-off Approach to Creating Art Across Cultures

This story comes to you from the exhibition catalog The China Syndrome, available in cfile.library. To view the sample catalog click here or to get full access to the cfile.libary begin your free membership trial today.

Paul Mathieu: The China Syndrome
Burlington, Ontario: Art Gallery of Burlington, 2016
29 pages

Paul Mathieu didn’t touch the work in his show The China Syndrome (2016) until after it was complete. Mathieu first visited China in 2003 for a residency in Jingdezhen, the world capital of porcelain. He found the production of porcelain and the role of “artist” to be acutely dissonant to western ideals. He observed the way that Chinese craftspeople divvied up the production of a vase into many small, specialized tasks. Mathieu was in awe of the expertise that surrounded him in Jingdezhen, of those who paint the same intricate design on vases everyday or those who throw 50 of the same form every day.

In his work at Lee-Chin Family Gallery this year however, Mathieu did lend a hand in the physical assembly, but not much. Mathieu photographed nudes from different angles, in a variety of positions, then arranging the photographs digitally on “virtual vases”. Sometimes he arranged the photographs in strips, in the style of Eadweard Muybridge’s running horses. Other times they were inspired by famous Manet and/or Velasquez nudes. The virtual vases were then emailed (presumably) to craftspeople in Jingdezhen whom Mathieu hired to hand paint blank porcelain forms as copies of the virtual vases. The blank porcelain was also manufactured by unnamed Chinese craftspeople. Cracks, flowers, and flesh tattoo decals were then layered over the paintings, further obscuring the scene.

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“Each time the individual personality of the maker was removed, the imagery took on greater importance.”

— Jonathan Smith,  Art Gallery of Burlington

Mathieu concerns himself mostly with the relationship between surface and form–his form being an excruciatingly simple, functional vase or bowl. He has found that a 2D image can become 3D when distorted to fit the surface of a pot; he can swap the gender of nude subjects by draping an image over the surface of a bowl so that the body is on the inside of the bowl and the face is outside. Indeed a pot can function as a photograph, and a photograph as a pot. But when a different hand is throwing the form, decorating the surface, and firing the kiln, what then is the relationship between surface and form? Then, Mathieu would probably argue, the relationship becomes cultural.

The full Paul Mathieu: The China Syndrome catalog is available to our members in cfile.library. If you are not a member, click here for a sample catalog. China Syndrome catalog contains two essays by Janna Hiemstra, Curator and Director at Craft Ontario and Jonathan Smith, Curator at Art Gallery of Burlington.