Art, politics, and gender are deeply intertwined as art is inevitably a product of specific socio-political contexts. Governmental censorship and political interference even more so affect the experience of women living in societies in which there is no freedom of artistic expression, no freedom to imagine, to create, or to distribute diverse cultural expressions.How do these experiences impact women artist’s expressions today?
On March 25th, 2021, 1014 hosted a discussion with artist Cornelia Thomsen, who spent the first 20 years of her life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) before immigrating to the United States, and artist Tiffany Chung, who was part of the refugee exodus from Vietnam to the United States, but returned to live in Vietnam for over a decade. Moderated by Curator Frauke Josenhans, Associate Curator at the Moody Center for the Arts.
This event is co-presented with the German Consulate General in New York.
Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/USA) is internationally noted for her research-based installations and cartographic works that examine conflict, migration, urban transformation and environmental impact in relations to the history of specific places. Her work remaps historical and cultural memories of traumatized topographies, creates interventions into the political narratives produced through statecraft with people’s rememberance, and unpacks the root causes of forced migration and its inextricable link to political, social, economic and environmental processes. Chung was awarded the Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize (2013), named Jane Lombard Fellow for Art & Social Justice at the Vera List Center, New School (2018-2020), and honored with the 2020 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India by Asia Society.
Selected museum exhibitions and biennials include: Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue, Smithsonian American Art Museum, D.C. (2019); Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War, Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); New Cartographies, Asia Society, Houston (2018); 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Gwangju Biennale (2018); Detours, Nobel Pieace Center, Oslo (2017); Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, MoMA, New York (2016); XIII Bienal de Cuenca, (Ecuador, 2016); 10th Taipei Biennial (2016); EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial (2016); Illumination, Louisiana MoMA (Denmark, 2016); All The World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Residual: Disrupted Choreographies, Carré d'Art – Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nimes (France, 2014); Sharjah Biennial (UAE, 2013); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012); Six Lines of Flight, San Francisco MoMA (2012).
Cornelia Thomsen (Germany/USA) is a contemporary artist living and working in New York since 2006, best known for her abstract paintings. Cornelia Thomsen began her career in 1990 as an artist at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Meissen near Dresden after a 4-year apprenticeship in the company, where she was trained to paint baroque patterns onto porcelain. In 1994 she moved to Frankfurt where she enrolled in the University of Art and Design in Offenbach/Frankfurt. She turned to abstraction and developed her Stripes painting series in 2008 after a subsequent move to New York. The original idea of the series was based on her observation of the ocean, with its fluctuating colors and luminosity. Initially she painted the works in a horizontal format but soon decided to flip the orientation to a vertical format to detach the stripes from their reference to nature. The Stripes paintings consist of vertical bands of irregular widths that reach to the very edges of the canvas. They are a result of subtle differences in width, color and intensity. The Stripes produce a flickering sensation imbuing the overall composition with an optical effect, which is created by using strong contrast of dark and light colors and the juxtaposition of blurred and sharp lines.
The drawings are an intrinsic, if not intimate persuasion of a light that verges on a kind of drifting. The strokes of the ink pen are not punctuated but move quietly, yet intensely, from one area of concentration to another. The result in the larger works on paper is a kind of ephemeral surface and in the smaller ones a more purely abstract composition.
Cornelia Thomsen’s abstract work is primarily concerned with formal matters and deal with basic questions about color and line. She also engages with postwar German history through figurative paintings, drawings and watercolors. One example is the series Role Models, which consists of 10 paintings of East German officials who were active when she was growing up in East Germany. The Meissen Propaganda Dishes are a cynical look back into her time at the Meissen Manufactory and consist of 12 paper dishes with original Meissen flower decorations combined with ideological slogans. Figurative works are the focus of Cornelia Thomsen’s work during the past two years and show her interest in psychological studies. With her distinctive body of work Cornelia Thomsen keeps abstract and figurative work in tension, finding inspiration from the rich history of abstract art and from her upbringing in former East Germany.
Cornelia Thomsen was born in Rudolstadt in the German Democratic Republic in 1970. After the reunification of Germany she moved to Frankfurt and received BA and MFA degrees from the University of Art and Design in Offenbach/Frankfurt, Germany. She currently lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Kashima Arts, Tokyo (2018, 2015), Felix Ringel Gallery, Duesseldorf, Germany (2017), Leslie Feely gallery, New York (2016, 2014) the German Consulate General, New York (2014), and the Friedrich Fröbel Museum, Bad Blankenburg, Germany (2014). She participated in group exhibitions at the Felix Ringel Gallery, Duesseldorf Germany (2019), Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (2015), the Manhattan Graphics Center, New York (2010), and the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York (2008).
Frauke V. Josenhans (Moderator) is Associate Curator at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, where she conceives interdisciplinary projects, working closely with artists. Her current exhibition Artists and the Rothko Chapel: 50 Years of Inspiration is on view until May 2021. Josenhans was formerly the Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. There, she curated various exhibitions such as Modern Art from the Middle East and Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope. Previously Josenhans worked at cultural institutions in both Europe and the U.S., notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
She has authored and contributed to English, French, and German art-historical journals, books, and catalogues, focusing on global modern and contemporary art. Her publications include Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope (2018 Silver Medal, Fine Art Books, Independent Publisher Book Awards), and Artists and the Rothko Chapel: 50 Years of Inspiration. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from Aix-Marseille Université and has graduate degrees in art history and museology from the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre.