Paul Mathieu

Paul Mathieu’s dazzling exhibition of ceramic vessels occurred—appropriately enough—at the Richmond Art Gallery, which serves a lively community of mixed Asian and European influences. The West Coast of Canada is very much attuned to its Pacific Rim location, and Richmond, in particular, is more Chinese-identified than any other municipality in Greater Vancouver. Mathieu’s art examines aspects of the cultural and commercial intersection of West and East, combining postmodern impulses and innovations with traditional forms and decorations.

Mathieu himself represents a thrumming hub of cross-cultural experience. His ceramic studies took him from his native Quebec to Alberta, England and the United States; he has taught in Montreal, Mexico, Paris and Vancouver (where he is now based); he has exhibited internationally; and has made repeated visits to China in recent years. Through his art, Mathieu expresses an acute awareness of our irreversibly globalized condition.

His practice also reflects a recent trend towards investing the craft medium of ceramics with “high art” concepts and credibility. “My intent is to contest and subvert altogether art, design and crafts,” he writes in his artist’s statement. In his exhibition, the line between art and craft was smudged to the point of irrelevance. Given that so much post-studio and idea-based art is cross-disciplinary—seeking out the most appropriate medium for each individual project, rather than aligning the artist with any one material or style—Mathieu’s art seems to say: Why should clay be excluded from the realm of choice? Decorative, functional and conceptual considerations were all juggled in his show, along with brightly coloured elements of humour and provocation. Interestingly, his challenge of art-world hierarchies echoes the more direct political commentary in his work, whether he is taking on sexual orientation or totalitarianism.

The exhibition suggested references to the California-based Funk movement of the 1960s, here rolled into millennium-old Chinese ceramic production techniques. Again, Mathieu’s art is shaped by contemporary concerns about social, economic and political conditions, and it employs strategies of appropriation from art history, popular culture and mass communication. As with contemporary art in other media—notably photography— his work challenges romantic notions of the individual authorial voice. In his recent vessels, authenticity and originality duke it out with anonymous labour and mass manufacture.

This latter aspect may be the most contentious in his show “Making China in China.” The four dozen vessels on view were produced with artisans in Jingdezhen, a city in central China famed for both the longevity and immensity of its ceramic production. (Walk into any import shop in any Chinatown across the continent—indeed, around the world—and you will encounter porcelain from Jingdezhen.) Mathieu’s working methods are more conceptual than collaborative, inasmuch as he originates the idea for each object and then contracts out its execution with greater or lesser degrees of creative input from the factory-based artisans he employs. With greater or lesser degrees, too, of control over the appearance of the ultimate product. That this practice eerily echoes former colonial relationships between West and East adds an unsettling element to the whole post-colonial undertaking.

In some of his works, Mathieu has overseen the flip of convex into concave imagery, disrupting expected arrangements of mould-made faces, including representations of Buddha and Mao Tse-tung, and idealized depictions of little Chinese boys and girls. He has also piled up conglomerates of elements of stereotypical porcelain figurines, using, say, grape-like clusters of little heads as feet for vessels, or attaching small faces or figures to larger figures in extravagant arrangements. Elsewhere, he has scrambled together all kinds of rich patterns and decorative motifs, including the setting of three-dimensional pieces inside plush, silk-lined boxes. The effect is both unsettling and capricious.

In other instances, Mathieu presented plain cast copies of Paul Matisse’s portrait bust Henriette to individual porcelain painters in Jingdezhen and invited them to decorate the work in ways commensurate with their customary practices. The resulting series boasts a flamboyant diversity of glazes, motifs and carving techniques. Writing in the exhibition’s catalogue, artist Liz Magor observes an apparent “aesthetic promiscuity” in this work; that is, each bust is decorated in one or more styles traditionally associated with a particular form, such as for vases, bowls or teapots. The patterns and colours used were developed during the Ch’ing dynasty for export to the West, she further explains, and their cultural and commercial significance is complicated by an earlier history of Jesuit missionizing in China and a later fad of chinoiserie in Europe. The latter influence, of course, found direct or indirect expression in much Post-Impressionist and early Modernist art, including that of Monsieur Matisse. Thus the recycled and subversive connection with Henriette. (Matisse was one of a number of Modernists who played with decoration, before mid-20th-century proscriptions disgraced it and postmodern invention set out to reclaim it.) More subversive still, Mathieu has upended each bust so that the woman’s neck becomes that of a functional vase. You could fill these vessels with water and set flowers in them if you wished, again undermining high art’s precious remove from functionality.

Mathieu also upended mould-made depictions of fat Buddha figures, and he commissioned photo-based images of famed walls (the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China) and militarized borders (complete with watchtowers, barbed wire and armed guards) to be copied onto the back of each. (The applied “decoration” may also be executed upside-down.) Titled “Wall Jars,” this series of topsy-turvy and seemingly incompatible juxtapositions speaks again to globalized culture and commerce, and to the social, political and environmental abuses that may underlie international trade. Similarly, Mathieu’s “Tienanmen Flower Vases” conflate traditional Chinese landscape scenes with photo-derived images from that short-lived and ultimately violent confrontation between pro-democracy demonstrators and Chinese authorities in Beijing. The result is perversely lovely—and sadly sobering.

With equal measures of beauty, oddity and alienation, the artist reminds us that the imported bowls, vases and teapots that we buy from local merchants (along with clothing, toys, electronics, notebooks, glassware, leather goods, linens, home accessories, and on, and on, and on) are indelibly inscribed with the conditions of our fellow beings on the other side of the world. Whether we travel compulsively or never leave home, there is nowhere our money has not been. ■

“Paul Mathieu: Making China in China” was exhibited at the Richmond Art Gallery from May 2 to June 1, 2006.

Robin Laurence is a writer and curator and a contributing editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.