This interview was conducted in Guangzhou on April 6 2016 by Kira Simon-Kennedy for chinaresidencies.com (edited by kiwisual).

 

Tom Hayes is an artist, as well as former and future artist residency director. We first met Tom when he was running Da Wang Culture Highland in Shenzhen, then caught up with him again in Guangzhou during his residency at kiwisual Arteco.

 

CR: What brought you to this residency at kiwisual?

 

TH: The idea of the stone, this alien egg, fit quite well in the way I wanted to work. I submitted a proposal of my project for the stone, but since I come from a ceramics background, I proposed a slightly different concept than just painting on the stone. 

 

CR: What do you think of the whole environment?

 

TH: I prefer to be in spaces like these that are a bit more peaceful. It’s a bit outside the city. It’s a nice environment for Guangzhou, it’s a rare opportunity. It’s well serviced too, it’s a resort really. They clean the rooms and provide three meals a day.

 

CR: How much do you interact with the team?

 

TH: Stephen [kiwisual's art director] isn’t based here, but he wants to make a film about each artist, and really use the whole experience of artists being here as part of their company's portfolio. They create really nice publications, they’re really helpful but they’re not too demanding. They all want to know what I’ve been up to, it makes a big difference. 

 

CR: How are you working with the commercial aspect of this residency?

 

TH: Well I’m trying to be a little ironic with it, using the pattern of “kou” the character for “mouth” to reference consumption in my work. For me, it’s a fascinating project to work with a plastic stone, since I usually work with real natural materials. I’m happy to produce something for this stone project, and they do really want to take them places and show them in different cities. If it sells, great, they’re very transparent about how the profits will be split, and otherwise this seems to just fit in with some of the work I've been doing recently and I'm enjoying being a full-time artist again, rather than doing all the running around, hair falling out, organising and managing. I’m glad they’re working on showing them in public spaces, to audiences who might never walk into a gallery. Artists like Frog King took the project to heart too, he really thought about how to transfer his work and performance onto this object. 

 

 

CR: It’s an interesting approach that doesn’t hide the fact that there needs to be some financial return.

 

TH: Well there’s a slight naivety in how simple this is — we’re all learning, and they’re dedicated to figuring it out. The original idea was really just to create pretty rocks, like Cow Parade, the cow project that started in Chicago and New York City in 1999. Some of them were just cute and wacky, but it’s great to see people start to work a little more conceptually.

 

CR: What are you doing with your stone?

 

TH: It’s rooted in languages, I call this series I’ve been making in China “Origins” — for ceramics, it was thinking about its start in the earth. The very beginnings of civilzation and language is another fascinating aspect for me, from the origins of simple symbols to the new languages of computing and binary coding. I’ve been creating installations of clay and porcelain, using, often pictograph, characters that relate to the land and nature. I started with the idea of the seal as signature, and with the elemental geometric shapes of circles and squares. In traditional Chinese culture the square represents the earth and the circle the heavens, and seals are originally made form stones. The stamp becomes a signature of itself, not using a stamp to write my name but to represent the earth. I’ve been working with the four character chengyu structure, they’re often aphorisms that have a broader meaning. The number four also directly relates to the four corners of the earth, the sixiang four symbols unfolding from the Taiji, and the four sided square in this sense, I asked someone why it’s always four, and they said because two is lucky, so two twos is even luckier. I guess I'm trying to link that moment at the dawn of civilization with this moment now in history, the future, technology, computing, connections and communication. Also, my Chinese work permit says “alien", so I kind of like this idea of being an alien here. You really are an alien here. 

 

CR: How is the work you’re making here related to or different from your usual practice?

 

TH: Like a lot of my work this uses very earthly or monochromatic colors. This work is really stripped back to geometric shapes - I suppose as some reference to science and mathematics and the prescence of man.  I like in islamic art how geometric patterns are a way to transmit understanding of science and nature on a different level, as it is forbidden to make representations of God. It kind of looks like minimalist art, to a foreigner’s eyes. There’s a rejection of personal expression, though you get close and you can see it was done by hand and not a machine. I’m hoping that for Chinese audiences, they’ll see “tian” the character for field, then see the rice, the soil, and make the connections that way, and from a Western point of view, they’ll see a square and the ink, and then make the link through the text. Traditionally, ink is made from burned pine resin. 

 

I worked with a friend from Dafen painting village called Huang Huaiyan to make the seals, and he’s so knowledgable about Chinese painting and symbolism. It's quite strange geometric stuff but he gets some expression in there too. He’s creating part of this. The seals he carves aren’t simply about me making a mark directly, it’s about creating a channel for marks to be made. Like when I layer seeds into pots that grow and change the shape of the object, burning away during the firing, leaving behind traces of forms and behaviours.

 

CR: What else have you been working on?

 

TH: I’ve been working with felt mats that are used to place under calligraphy paper, to absorb the excess water, looking into iterations of the Bagua as they fit into matrixes. The Bagua are 8 symbols derived from the Taiji understanding of the universe. The mats are used just a tool to get dirty with marks during the painting process and sit there under the paper unnoticed. The stamp is also usually a very small part of the final painting but I’m taking them as an essential, central part of the image.

 

 

Original article: http://www.chinaresidencies.com/news/101