Where does art begin?  Xin City traces artistic origin points of Lu Zhang and Herb Tam, curatorial collaborators, individual artists and life partners.

Zhang's work in sculpture, painting and drawing is shown alongside her grandfather's daily practice calligraphy written on recycled newspapers from 1990s China.  Tam shows a selection of early and more recent paintings that are contextualized with his found image scrapbooks filled with magazine and newspaper clippings from the early 2000s.

Xin City reveals the emotional and subconscious undercurrents of these two artists' increasingly personal art practices.  The exhibition's title, Xin City, honors Zhang's late grandfather Fu Zong Xin (浮宗信) whose disciplined approach to structuring time formed the spiritual realms the artists now inhabit.

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Lu Zhang (b. Xian, China), now works and lives visually and linguistically in New York.

Lu is a New York based artist born in Xi'an, China.  She creates intimate experiences that reenact memories and dream states to tell stories in the form of installations incorporating ceramics and video; she also works collaboratively in performances that engage the public in explorations about the nature of relationships.  Lu's recent film A Girl Sings Along Without Knowing the Words, an experimental documentary film essay, was screened at Royal Queen dim sum restaurant in Flushing, Queens, New York.

Lu received her MFA in Fine Arts and MS in Art History from Pratt Institute and holds a BA degree in Economics from Xi'an JiaoTong University.  Lu's recent exhibitions include public space in Flushing, New York, Art Lot, Pearl River Mart, Yeh Art Gallery, Underdonk, Latitude Gallery, The Clemente Soto Vélez, Present Company, Special Special, NARS Foundation, Museum of Chinese in America, A.I.R Gallery, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Korean Culture Center, Xi'an Academy of Fine Art.  Lu has given artist talks, lectures and public programs nationally and internationally.

Early this year, I started painting a window view from my late grandpa's house where I spent many summer and winter vacations.  It is located in the east of Xi'an and takes about 2 hours to get there.  I have always remembered this place as a rural utopia for me to escape from school and teenage dramas.  My grandfather lived on a compound centered around an ordnance factory (some of the selected newsprints are from the Factory Daily in the 1990s).  The factory staff live in an apartment community built by Russians that includes a stadium for basketball, volleyball, roller skating and badminton.

Grandpa taught me to practice calligraphy on newspapers while I was dreaming about life in those slow summer times.  We would write, eat, play mahjong in his old apartment backyard.  There were always flowers growing by him.  He also watched me play basketball in the late evenings with his bamboo fan and a soda in hand at night on those dirt courts till I use up all my energy.  Then we would walk home across the street.

I came from a non-art family.  My mom was adopted by my late grandpa; he's her uncle.  The practice strokes on past newspapers might have been my only formal art education before grad school in the US, but I still can't write in the cursive style known as crazy grass (狂草) that grandpa could.  He was a mechanical engineer and he drew better than computers could.  I have heard him talking about the big Mao Zedong murals he worked on in the 70s, but none of them were documented or preserved; neither was any of my calligraphy practice.

These calligraphy practice writings on newspapers were found in a drawer near his plants desk after he passed away this year due to China's re-opening during COVID.  He moved to a new apartment and this tiny pile of writing must have been selected by him.

In 2012, I left China to come to New York.  I bought a point-and-shoot digital pocket camera for him.  There weren't smart phones at the time.  Every year when I visited home I would show him where on earth I went; he would show me the landscape on his running routes: sunrise, sun set, flowers he encountered.  In his 80s, he still runs but not as far and as long as he used to.  His photos appeared with more window views, but there were always sunrises and sunsets; as well as images from Xi'an Daily newspaper and TV screens.  He might have traveled the world during the pandemic through his phone images of TV landscapes.  (My piece But Lost Also A Lie using ceramic, silk, and collaged images, were created as hanging memories based on his photographs).

In 2018, three of my grandparents passed away.  That moment made me feel like a big chunk of my connection with China, with Xi'an, with myself vanished.  I made a window painting of my grandparents to wonder where they went, because my parents maintained the space the same even 5 years till now. (Who Left the Light on For Me).  When I was working on Only a Window Apart painting, my grandpa suddenly caught COVID and had to be hospitalized.  While I was working on the painting, his situation worsened.  I had a fear that making the painting pushed him outside the window to a different world.  And momentarily at loss.

Since then I left working on the painting.  And I left New York to see him.  He didn't make it.  I hugged him and kissed his forehead when I saw him.  I held his hands, said goodbye in my heart, and also said don't be afraid.  I think I was telling myself.

The past nine months, I have practiced calligraphy when I miss him; nine months later, I completed this painting for Xin City.  Between illusion and reality, Only A Window Apart.

Herb Tam has been the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) since 2011.  He is also an artist and member of the painting club P_lub.  He co-curated Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods in Flushing in 2023.  Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He studied at San Jose State University and earned a MS in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

In 1995, I started to save newspaper and magazine photo clippings into large sketchbooks, taping them down in random configurations based on available space.  I would flip through these image banks when looking for something new to paint: a Mercedes sedan racing through a desert landscape, a euphoric crowd at a concert, a generic sunset, etc.

I took this daily practice with me when I moved to New York in 1998, where I steered my art towards painting's conceptual turn.  I began to mechanically reproduce spreads from my scrapbooks–acting more like a printer– and gave up on the quick, impressionistic work I was making before.  These new paintings took forever to complete, and the laborious process eventually exhausted my drive to make them.  I didn't want to be a slave for my art so I quit in 2004.

I kept cutting and pasting anyway, making books of images that tracked newsworthy and banal happenings, as well as my tastes in images.  The practice forced me to make instinctive decisions, to follow a natural order, and to accept randomness.  It taught me to trust what I felt and to edit with a light touch.

I returned to painting in the beginning of the pandemic after many years not touching a brush.  I was part of a painting club called P_lub along with Lu Zhang and Trisha Baga.  We painted expanded portraits of friends by taking turns on a single canvas, adding to, changing or deleting what the previous painter had put down.  The paintings we created always surprised us.  They were things none of us could have ever imagined wanting to make, but when we stared at them together in our studio's kitchen they made me recalibrate how to think about what I'd want to put out into the world.

I'm showing two of my found image books, a painting I made of one of the book spreads, and a cherished P_lub painting of Edwin Ramoran, a curator who, when he was director of the Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, gave me my first opportunity to curate an exhibition at a formal art institution.  I learned my greatest exhibition-making lessons from Edwin's mentorship, guidance and model.  He left New York and stopped working as a curator years ago to take care of his mom and dad, a brave and unselfish decision that I deeply admire.

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