Art exhibit rounds the Pacific Rim

The East-West concept, especially in Hawaii, can be molded into many different shapes, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa art department has taken advantage of this. Its "East-West Collaboration" shows have featured artists from the former East and West Germany, and artists native to Asian countries who immigrated to Westernized ones.

This year it was back to basics, said UH ceramics professor Suzanne Wolfe, one of the organizers of the event. Wolfe, along with fellow ceramics professor Brad Evan Taylor, chose 10 artists from Pacific Rim countries to spend four weeks in Hawaii this summer, giving classes and demonstrations and producing works for the exhibit. They will be on display until Dec. 9 at the UH Art Gallery.

"What’s particularly challenging about that is that artists come from a different place, they’re used to different materials, they’re used to a different working environment," Wolfe said. "That can sometimes be challenging, and I thought this group adapted so well."

Participating artists came from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Mexico, China, Taiwan, Thailand and the U.S. West Coast.

"I think every single artist has a unique approach," said Taylor, "so first and foremost, I think they were chosen as being outstanding artists, and second, we tried to divide that out amongst countries so there was an interesting mix culturally."

The exhibit shows a variety of approaches to ceramics, ranging from the whimsical to the sentimental.

Garth Johnson, a California-based artist, used interesting technologies in his creations. He converted an Egg-bot — a device used to decorate Easter eggs — into one that scratched designs onto ceramic eggs.

For a series of plates, he filled paint balls with ceramic colors and shot them at thrift-store plates, some of which didn’t hold up. "There’d be something crashing, and you know it would be one of Garth’s plates," Wolfe said with a laugh.

Another invited artist, Ayumi Shigematsu, a professor at Kyoto University of Arts, is widely recognized in Japan as the first female ceramist to be hired as tenured professor there. She chose one of the most challenging types of ceramics, a process known as terra sigillata, to produce an abstract sculpture that resembles, in a surprisingly lifelike way, a huge, malformed ear.

Taylor said terra sigillata is "a little bit finicky" because it shrinks at different rates from one part of the piece to another. "If one little thing changes, by coming some place like this, everything changes," he said, adding that terra sigillata can be especially useful in trying to mimic skin.

On the other hand, Jingjing Zhang, a dean at Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute in China, managed to make ceramic look like ribbons blowing in the breeze while simultaneously conjuring Chinese tradition. She etched calligraphy into a plaster slab, then poured liquified clay onto it. The liquid formed a sheet over the slab, settling into the etchings, and after it dried she sliced it into ribbons.

For their part, Taylor and Wolfe created objects in rough, massive shapes. Taylor embedded straw into a massive lumps of white clay, intending to examine how the clay, which he made himself, moved as it was being fired.

"I’ll put them in the kiln so I can watch them," he said. "Rather than just hardening it, I’m changing the form through the firing process."

He said he is leaving the interpretation to the viewer. "One of the students was trying to figure out how I was trying to interpret the Hawaiian Islands," he said. "I hadn’t even thought of that."

Wolfe created two imitation boulders that reminded her of the rocks from her grandmother’s yard.

"I’ve always wanted to make big rocks like this," she said. "It’s really terrible to say it’s nostalgic, but it is."