Patchwork Quilt by Gan Chin Lee (b.1974) is part of a larger work Hybridity that had won the 15th Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award, Taiwan in 2017. This work comprises 50 wooden panels of collages using cut-outs of various books and prints of scanned book covers. Carefully selected from the artist’s personal shelf, the list of books spreads across categories such as academic texts, literature to dictionaries. When viewed as a whole, the work emanates a sense of nostalgia and harmony from the panels’ arrangement resembling the patchwork quilt Gan’s mother used to sew from mismatching pieces of scrap cloths. However, upon inspection of each print, the mismatch of text and images tell a disparate story. Some parts of the collage may appear familiar while others may seem arbitrary but these are all part of the artist’s knowledge bank, and the work, is metaphoric to the “fragmented” course of acquiring this miscellany of knowledge. Books, to the artist, is the access to knowledge that harnesses one’s worldview. From classical Tang dynasty poems to a publication on Southeast Asian art to titles such as “kerajaan: Budaya politik melayu di ambang pemerintahan kolonial” (Government: Malay Political Culture on the Eve of Colonial Rule), the array of books in this work itself leaves one to perceive highly of the well-learned, multi-lingual artist. Yet, presented in a mishmash of fragmented pieces espouses Gan’s love-hate relationship with texts. One would tickle at the witty collage of Edward Said’s book (author of Orientalism) alongside Japanese Woodblock Prints or the juxtaposition of a book on migrant worker studies and another on Capitalism in the same panel. While this wealth of information is promising, his understanding of these ideologies is often conflicting and compromised by the politics of language and translation, leaving him at times frustrated and lost. This internal struggle stems from Gan experience of cultural “hybridity” or what he also calls “chaos of cultural identity”. Patchwork Quilt is a departure from Gan’s usual photojournalistic-style painting of the everyday, with subjects caught in their social realities. This set of 50 prints are less straightforward, in fact conceptually heavier, requiring one to understand the history(s) and experiences presented to ease out the thematic the artist expresses.
