The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters
 
The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters, my first solo show at Dean Project, includes the full range of my work: installation, sculpture, cut paper, photography, and video. The title, The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters, is a variation of the title of the well-known etching by Goya, “El sueno de la razon produces monstrous” from the Los Caprichos series. The title was selected for its evocative mix of haunting imagery, representing history and the anxieties of life.
 
My exhibition, The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters, is also layered with stories, memories, and cultural metaphors - my own, my family’s, our ghosts – and animal and human sounds that were mumbled, screamed, overheard, and imagined. My cabinet of curiosities includes luminaries such as a modern-day Chinese Ox Guardian of Hell, a multi-limbed Beckoning Cat, along with creatures of my own invention, and various body fragments. Inhabiting the realm of temporality, private obsessions and the sensual, my images are both personal and allegorical, requiring more than one level of understanding.
 
The work never adheres to or illustrates a particular story but instead is developed via an onslaught of associational and discordant pivotal images, such as scenes from Günter Grass’ Tin Drum to the Chinese concept of “eating bitterness”. My compilation of images both Eastern and Western delve into our universal fears, superstitions, and the demons that haunt us by day and night.
 
I grew up in suburban Long Island, the bedtime stories of my mother’s childhood in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation juxtaposed with the sounds of Lost in Space on our family’s television set in the background. My teenage years followed with the event of my father’s return to China, where he reunited with his family and trained PhD students in Beijing at the end of the Cultural Revolution, colliding with the accidental death of my first boyfriend. The realization of the family purges and suicides was compounded by the later revision of history and ironic rise of some of those relatives to the Hall of Revolutionary Heroes. I eventually pursued my version of my father’s path, studying, working and living in Northern China, and discovering more than I intended to about the countryside and superstition.
 
Naturally personal experiences and family history play a major role in the vantage point of an artist. Over time it melds into the language of the artwork and the work becomes cyclical. Paper was a starting point and primary medium due to its accessibility, ephemeral qualities, affordability, and its associations with ritual, folk culture, and ordinary life. But my interests have been to extend the field of drawing and works on paper into the realm of installation, sculpture, and film.
 
In my studio, there has been an ongoing dialogue with other materials, an abstract narrative, and both a visceral and literary approach throughout my twenty years of working as an artist. The edges and boundaries of sanity, nuances in the body, a sense of longing, and shame are essential elements in the work. I have deliberately left a level of ambiguity in the work, the question as to whom is eating whom remains. The vehicle of the transformed, masked, or monstrous figure allows for an outpouring of expression of the other, stranger, outsider. – Mary Ting