As the planet shrinks and opportunities for migration widen, artist Chila Kumari Burman is intrigued by the collision, blurring, multiplicity and hybridity of differing cultural values. The unique blend of socially-minded, Liverpudlian mentality combined with a Punjabi-Hindu migrant upbringing, have provided a wealth of material for the artist to draw from. Since the mid-eighties, the artist has made personal history and identity prevalent themes to her art.
In a surreal, swirling collision of past and present, Burman’s fiery, energetic montage prints pepper with garish British and Indian ice-cream advertising. Preferring visual sourcing that pulls from Hindi pop culture; she overlaps with lurid images pulled from Indian comic books, Bollywood posters, Hindu warrior queens and religious deities. Burman’s tongue-in-cheek irony reflects the landscape of her upbringing as well as heightening a deliberately contrived Indian female aesthetic.
While the images layering her digital prints appear innocently tantalising, closer inspection reveals works brimming with sexual innuendo. Focusing on social taboos to Asian female sexuality, Burman exposes imposed notions of glamour as perpetuated by the Western-leaning fashion industry in an era of post-feminism. Her depiction of the Asian woman is most readily served up through the multitude of recurrent self-portrait variants, wherein she uses identity as both a political and pictorial strategy.
For Asian-American artist Tiffany Chung the return to her native country of Vietnam has provided her with a vivid window into the country’s rapid and ongoing urban transformation. Chung has both a fascination and revulsion towards the excessive proliferation and absorption of pop culture in Vietnam today. Revelling in artifice and simulacra, Chung’s art is immersed in the burgeoning escapist spirit of capitalist rapacity that has gradually emerged from the wake of post-war trauma.
Incorporating industrial materials into fine hand-crafted sculptural pieces, Chung invokes contradiction and tension through her art. Constructing a sprawling, bubblegum coloured fantastical cityscape, Chung’s deliberately synthetic, quirky installation tempts desires by surrounding viewers with incessant sensory stimuli, evocative of living in a crazed commercially driven conurbation.
Combining pop art, abstraction and minimalism, Chung presents a deserted playground that reduces contemporary existence to the level of nothingness. Her topographical drawings chart the dynamic expansion of the Asian megalopolis but are also a psychological mapping of its materially-minded inhabitants.
The hyper-real colour and form of Chung’s art evokes the melting pot of cultural juxtapositions, mutation, and saturation that has become common eye-candy to the developing Asian city. Her art also alludes to the artificiality and stylised presentation of nature within the urban landscape, which in turn could be read as a metaphor for the pastiche of cultural appropriation that global consumers fervently embrace in an attempt to define the self.
In Confectionaries & Conurbations, the pairing of Chila Kumari Burman and Tiffany Chung presents two artists equivalent approach to visual aesthetics with similar thematic preoccupations into Asian pop culture, all served up with a homogenous sense of humour and uninhibited use of colour. Champions to the disposable superficiality of everyday kitsch, their seemingly light-hearted and whimsical approaches are underscored by personal historical legacies alongside complexities of identity and migration in a more interconnected global society.