Brendan Lee Satish Tang

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Brendan Lee Satish Tang, “Reluctant Offerings - Ford F-150,” 2021

watercolour on paper, wood, lights and cement, 6.7′ x 17′ x 6.5′ (courtesy the artist and Gallery Jones, Vancouver)

The work in Brendan Lee Satish Tang’s solo exhibition at Gallery Jones in Vancouver is loaded with sweetly jocular juxtapositions. As I viewed it, I thought of the recent Bob Dylan tune, I Contain Multitudes, about a living being who holds within a range of paradoxes – a vulnerable wolf with an aching heart who sleeps with life and death in the same bed. Tang doesn’t reference this song specifically, but his sculptural forms echo the same theme.

In the past, Tang has produced large ceramic pieces, such as his Manga Ormolu series, human-scale hybrid vessels that unite Ming dynasty traditions with robust robotic prosthetics. While his ceramic medium is incredibly fragile, his sculptures evoke a humorous muscularity: large limbs from robotic toys push up the edges of a massive, seemingly ancient vase, wrinkling it like a worn shirt. This show, Reluctant Offerings, likewise has a comic effect due to its orchestration of dissonant extremes of scale. 

On view until Feb. 12, it is part of Tang’s Joss Paper series, composed of watercolour replicas of dear childhood objects. His website shows earlier examples: a true to size Game Boy; a Nintendo Punch-Out!! game cartridge from the ’80s; an old VHS tape of the film, You Can Call Me Bruce? These cherished items are rendered tenderly in fastidious detail on watercolour paper and folded into three-dimensional forms.

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Brendan Lee Satish Tang, “Small Truck,” 2021, wood and watercolour on paper

18″ x 4′ x 20″ (courtesy the artist and Gallery Jones, Vancouver)

Now, Tang has turned his attention to his memories of growing up in Nanaimo, B.C. Using the same painstaking approach, he has constructed a true-to-size model of a 1984 Ford F-150 pickup truck. Massive pine air-fresheners, about five feet in size, hang from the gallery’s ceiling, forming a forest around the truck. Throughout the gallery are life-size trucker hats, bottles of Labatt’s 50, and (there’s no polite way to say this) “truck nuts” – a testicular decoration that is sometimes hung under the rear bumper of pick-up trucks. All are beautifully constructed in paper and paint.

These pieces are astonishingly faithful to the originals, yet their graphic qualities point to the artifice. Watercolour paint naturally pools and saturates in places along the form, and the hand-drawn details lead the viewer back to Tang’s intervening hand. Due to its scale, the installation is immersive, but the full effect is achieved through thousands of tiny gestures.

In Chinese culture, joss papers are burned as an offering to the ancestors. During holidays and other ceremonies, loose sheets and paper models of earthly items are set alight to ensure the deceased are provided for in the afterlife. As items burn away in this world, they become material on the other side. Tang’s works are effigies for his ancestors. Many of the paper models in the exhibition are burned or singed in some way.

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Brendan Lee Satish Tang, “Reluctant Offerings - Ford F-150,” 2021

watercolour on paper, wood, lights and cement, 6.7′ x 17′ x 6.5′ (courtesy the artist and Gallery Jones, Vancouver)

The show culminates with a single-channel video in which a paper F-150 is burned to absolute nothingness, then looped backwards so the truck is reborn in the afterlife, moving from ashen wreckage through a pyramid of flame to slowly regain its original shape.

I love the world Tang constructs for his ancestors, showing care by ensuring they have essential pieces of him in the afterlife: a truck, truck nuts, some beer. It’s a funny and tender practice that puts life and death in the same room. It contains multitudes. ■  

Brendan Lee Satish Tang, Reluctant Offerings, at Gallery Jones in Vancouver from Jan. 15 to Feb. 12, 2022.

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