Inspired Imitations by a Lady Traveler

Like a classic kino-eye, Ellen Zweig, an American, pursues a relationship with Chinese culture and language by observing and staging reflections and imitations. Although it fills an entire gallery space, her latest installation works on the spectator the way Henri Michaux described Chinese poetry as, "so very delicate that it never meets an idea [. . .] the points indicated are not even the most important ones [. . .] the landscape and its atmosphere are deduced from them."¹ Zweig's material is densely delicate. Her work has a light, almost comedic feel, but the more you mull it, the subtler and richer the ideas.

For instance, there is a lot of uncooked white rice sprinkling through the imagery of this installation, but Zweig's handling of the rice invests it with more meanings than just the usual interpretations. Most often the rice is performing, falling like rain or rushing like magma. It is water and rock, the very elements, as well as abundance and sustenance. It overflows from inside a suitcase. It will not be contained and cannot be transported. And yet Zweig carries this shape-shifting rice as though in homage to cultural baggage.

Ellen Zweig travels throughout her large body of work as a performer, writer, and media artist exploring concepts of time, place, and culture. During the 1980s she frequently embodied the persona of the Victorian lady traveler. Her costumes evoked nostalgic longings, both for childhood, when dressing up and having mysterious adventures was acceptable, and for the beginnings of self-conscious modernity, when it was novel for a woman to travel and record her exotic exploits. Creating mediated performances in such a costume while investigating, as she did in Impressions of Africa, "American fantasies of a mythical Africa,"² casts a cool eye on cultural representation and perspective. Often she employed a camera obscura to call attention to the spectacle of media and the distortions inherent in mediated experience. In She Traveled for the Landscape (Stagecoach) Zweig converted a horse-drawn stagecoach into a camera obscura, dressed in crinolines, and invited passengers to ride with her through downtown Houston, Texas. Within the darkened coach they became like time-warped space travelers, going both forward and backward, both out in the world and shut-up within blindness, save a certain slant of light.

Zweig's more recent works have been primarily video installations and single-channel pieces, but they retain strong elements of performance and poetry. The theme of travel endures as well in her current series of projects, entitled HEAP, in which the artist explores China and interpretations of things Chinese. Interestingly, the earliest known mention of the effect that we think of as camera obscura was, according to Siegfried Zielinski reading Joseph Needham, from fifth century BCE China. The philosopher Mo Ti calls the camera obscura the "locked treasure room."³ In another room, Westerners who have used their reading of Chinese culture to propel or explain their philosophies are used as springboards for Zweig to explore various themes. In (The Chinese Room) John Searle the subject of the portrait wrote metaphorically about a Chinese Room, a place that you know you can never really know. He was arguing that artificial intelligence could never learn to become like a human mind, just as a Westerner is forever outside of the Chinese Room. Zweig's camera, editing and voiceover insights (including embarrassment at being unable to speak Chinese) create a vivid, intelligent portrait, but can a Westerner create a Chinese poem? The videos of the HEAP series come close.

Zweig's recent installation at CUE gallery, curated by Eleanor Antin, is part of this series. These works emerge within a tradition of documentary/travelogue video art that dates back to the early 1970s when portable video recorders became affordable and available to artists. They also depart from or extend that tradition. Unlike most documentary/travelogue video art, HEAP takes no overt political position. Neither is it overly personal or feminine. And, although Zweig often takes a playfully ironic stance in her juxtapositions and imitations, the viewer is not bombarded by her cleverness or badgered by structural simplicities...