The China Project

175 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection Sara TSE For Sara Tse, memory is triggered by sensations from particular material objects: texture, smell, a familiar shape or weight in the hand. These qualities are explored in Tse’s ‘Trans/form’ and ‘Dress’ works, combining the familiar skin-like sensations of gloves, socks and sweaters with the fragile beauty of porcelain. By carefully dipping pieces of everyday clothing into liquid porcelain slip, the fluid forms around and impregnates the fibres of the garments, creating a delicate shell or imprint before the object disintegrates during firing. The resulting casts are bone-like and fragile. While Tse formally trained as a ceramicist in both Hong Kong and Melbourne, her approach to porcelain differs from the elaborate moulding process of the traditional craft. Rather than producing a highly finished surface, Tse’s hand-dipped porcelain garments remain raw and unadorned. Tse challenges the sense of reverence traditionally inspired by porcelain’s shiny surface, returning it to a basic materiality: with the qualities of lightness, shape and fragility. That Tse’s porcelain pieces possess a sense of their former use is important to her: the socks are worn thin at the toes with a hole apparent in one foot, and the embroidered sweaters appear shapeless and almost in tatters. Tse’s choice of garments is crucial. She says that ‘a dress, like a house or a film, is both lived and loved. Clothes exhibit the consumption of the living: like the furniture we use, they “wear” the marks of life’. 1 Tse’s art exists in the space haunted by the absence–presence of a real object. Her works are not a representation of real objects or Duchampian readymades constructed from found objects — they exist somewhere in between, a trace of what once was. The tactile nature of Tse’s porcelain objects brings the original garments out of the shadows of absence and into a palpable presence. Her choice of garments plays on the memories they hold and invites viewers to intimately engage in reveries about their own relationship to particular garments. These works can produce disturbing sensations: for an Australian audience, the slightly tattered and folded white garments may evoke images of Azaria Chamberlain’s infamous jumpsuit. 2 Likewise, the crumpled sweater with the word ‘Crash’ on its front conjures the garments from injured bodies at a crash site, or the smashing of this delicate object into thousands of pieces. Embedded within Tse’s porcelain garments is their role as a container for an absent body. The objects are also suggestive of an archaeological project, with the garments, preserved in a porcelain shell, evoking a sense of time passing. Tse’s delicate works remind us that memory is about entering a reflective space, and recalling ourselves and others through time — a narrative, poetic act, triggered by objects rather than facts. endnotes 1 Sara Tse, artist statement, <www.artbeatus.com/english. html>, viewed 18 February 2005. 2 In this famous and controversial incident, baby Azaria Chamberlain disappeared at Uluru (then known as Ayers Rock) in August 1980 during a family camping trip. Her mother said a dingo, a wild dog, had taken her. Although the baby was never found, items of her clothing, including a jumpsuit, were. See also Sophie Jensen ‘Azaria Chamberlain’s dress’, in Captivating and Curious [exhibition website], National Museum of Australia, 2006 <http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/ captivating_and_curious/the_stories_behind_the_objects/ azaria_chamberlains_dress/>, viewed February 2009. above Trans/form no.9.1 2003 Porcelain, fabric dipped in slip and fired / 2 components: a: 2.8 x 6.3 x 18.7cm; b: 3.3 x 6.2 x 18.5cm / Purchased 2004. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant opposite Dress no.68 2003 Porcelain, fabric dipped in slip and fired / 4.5 x 21 x 24.8cm / Purchased 2004. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant