Not only is there a dizzying array of cultural references, but each painting employs many different techniques, from masterfully rendered charcoal portraits to passages of painterly abstraction, from comic contour drawings to collage and assemblage. The relationship between what is being pictured and how it is rendered is dynamic and often surprising. This is especially the case with the screen devices that abound in Gu’s scenes. The devices—phones, computers, televisions—are collaged stock images on which the artist paints, generating a curious contrast between a screen’s presumed flatness and its painterly, textured surface.
And then there’s the yellow. Bright. Garish. Smiley-face yellow. The artist depicts his own body—fingers feeding his wife, a hand on the steering wheel, sometimes nothing more than a part in a dark head of hair—in an over-the-top and in-your-face yellow that both exaggerates and unsettles the generic packaging of Asian Americans.
—Eva Heisler
What prompted the series Classic Yellow?
A 2015 artist residency at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) was formative. Before this, I painted in oil or acrylics on large canvases. To maximize this opportunity—one month to make work in a New York City studio—I decided to play with collage and make small works on paper. The result was my Lovers Melt series where I married my academic training—tightly rendered drawings of faces—with my love of painterly abstraction. About a dozen or so pieces were produced in that one month. That work opened possibilities. I learned new things in terms of materiality. There was something to collage, the surprises encountered along the way, but there was also an interesting clashing of aesthetics between academic rendering versus pure pattern and color.
It took me a few years to digest the experience. In 2018, I started Classic Yellow, centered around myself and my wife. I wanted to make work that was purely for myself, devoid of market pressures. Part of that impulse came from disappointment as a young artist at not being able to find gallery representation. I was like, “Well, then, I’m going to go in the other direction and reject the gallery world, market prices, all of that. Just make work for me.” That freedom opened the work and allowed it to become better.
The one condition I set for the series was that my wife and I had to be in every piece, not necessarily prominently, not necessarily our faces, but I wanted to use our marriage as the starting point and then branch into political issues and social criticism. Also, I wanted to have fun as a painter. I wanted to juxtapose academic rendering, painterly gestures, collage, and found objects such as product packaging. I wanted that mix to echo our interracial relationship so that underneath it all was socio-political subtext, even if on the surface the painting might look whimsical or silly. I also wanted to be open to all kinds of inspiration, whether that’s a canonical figure from art history or some lowbrow sophomoric humor. Even some stupid meme template on social media can prove very fruitful.
Let’s talk about your painting The Scenic Route. I’m interested in the hodgepodge of screen devices. The windshield is one kind of screen, and then there are other screens in the car, a GPS, a phone showing a selfie, a video game, and the rearview mirror in which a smiley face is reflected (suggesting that the smiley face is you, the driver).
The catalyst for The Scenic Route was Vija Celmins’ painting Freeway (1966). It’s a photorealist painting of the view sitting in the passenger seat of a car, probably somewhere in California. I’m not a photorealist, so I’m not interested in replicating that, but the perspective warmed me. My wife and I take regular trips to upstate New York, the Hudson Valley, and the Adirondacks, because I grew up in Albany and my parents still live there. That was the start of the painting, and it provided an opportunity to consider the relationship between photography and painting, an ongoing debate since the advent of photography. Artists like Vija Celmins and other photorealists grapple with that. I think photography livens and brings greater vitality to painting because it forces painting to reconsider itself.
What about all the screen-based devices?
I use internet stock images of electronic devices. It’s important to me that I have no authorship of these images. I find a stock photo of, say, a GPS unit, a laptop, or a cell phone. I print it out and then I do a 1:1 painting on the stock image, such as the GPS map scene or the phone with my wife’s selfie using an Instagram filter. The purely photographic is juxtaposed against painting. There’s a jarring quality that’s visually interesting to me as an artist. Conceptually, there’s a tension as well because you’re taking this image found online for free. You have no authorship and it’s infinitely reproducible. On that surface is a 1:1 painting. There is something conceptually profound about that.
OK, so every time I see a phone or a GPS or any electronic device—
It’s a photograph that I’ve painted on. This then gets collaged into the larger painting.
In The Scenic Route, the GPS unit was a generic photograph of a car’s GPS unit, onto which I painted an invented map scene of upstate New York. The smartphone my wife is holding is also a photo, and then on that is a portrait. I texted her one day when she was at work and said, “Take a selfie with one of those stupid filters—I don’t care what—and then text the photo back to me.” I based the painting on that. Then, for the upper dash, where you see a video game, that’s one of the very first racing video games, OutRun. I wanted one particular scene of the car coming to a fork in the road.
I don’t want to hide the handmade quality of the images. If my lines are not straight, if it’s painterly, if the text is not perfect, I don’t care, because the point is the clash of the painter in me with the photograph.
Similarly, for the piece Oriental Flavor, I used a photo of an old-school TV. I inverted it, so the knobs are on the left rather than the right, taped off the screen, and then painted Mickey Rooney’s character from the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where he played a Japanese character called Mr. Yunioshi. That’s an infamous scene in the Asian American community, and the impetus for that particular piece of “oriental flavor.”
Oriental Flavor is a striking composition. In the top left corner, black chopsticks held by a yellow hand diagonally bisect the painting on their way to an open-mouthed white female in the bottom right corner. Between the chopsticks floats the television image of Mickey Rooney and a cellophane wrapper promising “oriental flavor.” A gilt-framed image of a white female, blurred, turned away, reminded me of Gerhard Richter. Hokusai’s Great Wave rises out of a bowl of noodles.
The large black chopsticks are painted, but those are actual chopsticks glued in the bowl of noodles. The framed image of my wife is a photo, and I deliberately reduced the pixels. On the photo, I painted the reflection of the chopsticks. The little round thing I’m feeding her is a smiley face—that’s the ramen noodle logo. Then I took a Sharpie and drew the barbed wire fence around the bowl of noodles, alluding to Japanese incarceration in the United States during World War II.
This, like other works in the series Classic Yellow, feels spontaneous, the strong, sometimes jarring, cropping reminding me of offhand intimate snapshots.
Well, the works are anything but spontaneous in their creation. It’s weeks of sketching, and I must plan; if I want this collage element here, I’ve got to know what’s underneath and what will be next to it. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. There’s a lot of layering. None of my works come together instantaneously. Now, there may be some spontaneity in the process but, in general, something will start with a little impetus but then I’m not sure how the rest will unfold. For example, I knew I wanted to paint the Mickey Rooney character, but I didn’t know how I would connect the pieces. I also knew I wanted to do something with chopsticks; I have sexualized them because the chopsticks obviously refer to my heritage and the sexuality to my marriage, but also this history of the emasculation of Asian men as portrayed in the West. For the chopsticks to appear sexual was important for me. But in what context would I use chopsticks? Well, we eat noodles with them. It’s the obvious choice, and then I’m making lunch one day, and I’m like, “Oh, this is perfect, ‘oriental flavor’—but ‘oriental’ in what way?” The Oriental Flavor packaging had to be dangerous; thus, it has the shape of a bomb. Also, it is intentionally phallic. That’s where the barbed wire surrounding the bowl of noodles came in. I began working on the ramen noodles, and I knew I wanted Hokusai’s The Great Wave to leap out of the noodles.
Because I’m centering this body of work around my marriage, most of the scenes are domestic. I’m not trying to paint some beautiful sunset in some amazing landscape. I don’t want to make a post-apocalyptic world like Anselm Kiefer. I’m just interested in the world that surrounds me, my house here in South Philly. Then, too, I enjoy rendering surfaces. Wallpaper. A marble countertop. I love painting wood grain texture. Tables; floors. And I love painting camouflage patterns. I own only one article of clothing with a camo pattern, but I love painting it. The scene might feel claustrophobic because it’s cropped, and you’re zoomed in. I like that because it implies this is not a static moment, but you’re a voyeur through our lives, and you just happen to have caught a glimpse of a particular moment.
Tell me about The Immigrants.
When I immigrated to America, the first TV show I remember watching was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He’s a poor kid from West Philly who moves to LA to live with wealthy relatives. In the opening credits, he’s pulling up in a cab at a mansion; he’s got a camera and this happy look on his face. That’s the perfect image to represent an immigrant’s arrival in America. The piece started with nothing more than I wanted to paint Will Smith from that scene onto a photo of a TV. That in and of itself was funny, but it’s just a one-liner.
I want the viewer to find my works both hilarious and horrifying. I want those two experiences simultaneously. The impetus for this painting was thinking about immigration and the immigrants. The anti-Chinese image from a Californian newspaper in the 1800s would be, I thought, a perfect image to go on a suitcase. The hand holding the suitcase originates from the PBS children’s show Arthur the Aardvark. Arthur’s clenched fist has become a meme template that denotes anger or frustration. Emigrants generally leave, not because they really, really want to but because they are after a better opportunity for their children or perhaps, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now, they are fleeing from danger. This painting was done in the summer of 2020, a time of social justice protests. A photo of Black Lives Matter protesters was cut into this grass shape as if they’re being mowed down; I even collaged a little tank turret in there. I often use my wife as a symbol for white supremacy in general, even though that’s obviously not how I view her.
Do you know Charles Yu’s 2020 novel Interior Chinatown? The main character is a bit player in television and, although he aspires to make it as “Kung Fu Guy,” he is relegated to roles like “Generic Asian Man Number One” or “Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy.” I was reminded of the novel’s descriptions of the social and psychological processes by which the main character “allowed himself to become Generic” when encountering all those smiley faces in your work. For example, Portrait (2018) depicts a white female painting her Asian lover as a smiley face, eye dots replaced with slits. What’s with all the smiley faces?
First, the smiley face is generally found on Chinese takeout bags. So, there’s a connection there. To take the big round eyes and deliberately make them slits is a way to address the view that we all look alike. How many times have I heard that before? How many times have I had a coworker mistake me for someone else? The infinite reproducibility of those plastic bags is analogous to the two-point-whatever billion people in China that “all look alike.” I embrace that as a self-portrait. Diametrically opposed to that, the very opposite of the most distilled, boiled-down version of a face, is the charcoal drawing of my face as I sit for the portrait. I can’t make an identical second charcoal drawing, but I can find a million more of those smiley faces. It’s humorous because the portrait is just a smiley face, but I’m also rendering it creepy or horrifying.
The availability of the smiley face as well as the potential for me to subvert that image is plentiful and that’s why it recurs in my work. Also, one of my favorite contemporary painters right now is Tala Madani. She does wonderful work that sometimes incorporates smiley faces, too.
Your paintings include actual objects, such as chopsticks, dollar bills, and an expired passport. In some paintings, the list of materials includes semen. What is the significance of painting with bodily fluids?
I’m not the first artist to do that. Part of it is simply the fact that, if you’re going to be 100 percent open to all materials, then bodily fluids should not be off the table. That’s part of it. Sometimes, when I’ve printed out an anti-Chinese historic poster, ejaculating on that is an expression of defiance or contempt that is symbolically satisfying. In other instances, the semen has ended up in the background of the painting. It’s me taking a shot at Jackson Pollock, no pun intended. With his drips and splatters. It doesn’t go much deeper than that but, again, if the finest old Holland oil paints are suitable to use, then so too should my genes be.
Can you say more about your creative process?
The piece Cry Me a River started with my most recent rejection letter from Skowhegan, one of the most competitive residencies. I took a screenshot of the email, printed it out, and then collaged it into the painting of a laptop. To drive home the point of how big an opportunity this would be, I bought a lotto ticket and collaged it into the painting. I didn’t scratch it—that could be a million-dollar lotto ticket, but I’m never going to know. Then, thinking about rejections and failure, that’s my reflection, a charcoal drawing. I cut out the smiley arrows from Amazon gift cards to overlay my face, and those are actual grains of rice to indicate tears. The paintings start with a little something and then blossom into something else.
The starting point for Not a Chinaman’s Chance was being given some crisp new dollar bills at the bank. I thought, “I’m not going to spend these; they could be used for something.” I cut the cowboy-and-steer shape out of a dollar bill. It’s the perfect representation of America, and I wanted to use it as the target in a shooting gallery. Because violence is as American as apple pie. That was the impetus. The origin of the phrase “not a Chinaman’s chance” comes from the American West, when Chinese miners and railroad builders were given the most dangerous tasks, like planting dynamite in a crevasse, but they were paid the least and were susceptible to being murdered by roving white gangs. Hanging from the ceiling is a Peking roast duck like you find in the windows of Chinatown restaurants.
That’s an interesting description of your process. The starting point may be a simple piece of material, like the dollar bill or the Skowhegan rejection letter, and then you begin circling around it, one material or image suggesting another. It’s not like you have an agenda—
No, I have an agenda. I want my work and I want myself to actively take up space as an Asian American. I don’t want to be “Chinese delivery guy number two.” I’m going to take up space, addressing issues within my community and how those issues relate to larger cultural contexts.
I absolutely have an agenda. I’m not neutral and I don’t believe in making apolitical art. I don’t think being an apolitical artist is possible. I think some artists fool themselves into thinking they don’t make political work when really that’s a choice you make because of privilege. My work is political. It doesn’t mean I’m making propaganda posters, but you can clearly see the kind of commentary I’m making on twenty-first-century America.
