Christine Tien Wang
New Works
November 4th – December 16th, 2023

M. LeBlanc is proud to announce the debut solo exhibition of new works from the San Francisco-based artist Christine Tien Wang. New Works marks Tien Wang’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. For over a decade, Tien Wang has honed a self-reflexive and critical approach to painting and its labor, typically employing the painted meme as a conceptual vehicle. Exhibited in Wang’s exhibition are four paintings – three singular works and one triptych.

Psychologist Harry Harlow published ‘The Nature of Love’ in 1958 to describe the effect of social isolation and maternal deprivation on infant monkeys. Popular psychoanalytic theories of the time attributed mother-child attachment to basic survival, the success of which was hinged on a supposed oral-erotic tendency latent in breastfeeding. Doubtful, Harlow suggested instead that ‘primary object-clinging,’ or the need for intimate physical contact often associated with the mother, is likely the dominating factor in mother-child attachment and healthy infant development. To compare the need for survival to that of affection, Harlow’s team took newborn monkeys from their mothers and put each in a separate cage with two inanimate stand-ins, or ‘mother-substitutes.’ One mother was made out of wire, and the other was made from cloth. Both concealed a lightbulb to provide the infants warmth, but only the wire-mother had a bottle of milk attached. Researchers observed that infant monkeys living in isolation with the two mother-substitutes preferred physical contact with the soft ‘cloth-mother’ to the food provided by the cold ‘wire-mother.’ (The baby monkeys would cautiously and quickly drink milk from the bottle attached to the ‘wire-mother’ before racing back to cling to the ‘cloth-mother.’) The cloth substitute was a comforting figure, ‘a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant,’ while the ‘wire-mother’ was a cold overlord, providing survival but wholly incapable of solace or intimacy.

In Amy Chau’s ‘Battle Myth of the Tiger Mom,’ Chau sets up a stark polarity between the strict parenting style of Chinese mothers and the comparatively lax approaches taken by Western parents. She employs the two classifications loosely, describing how not all ‘Western parents’ are alike, and how parents of all cultural backgrounds may become ‘Chinese mothers’ while some Chinese parents choose not to subscribe. The ‘Tiger Mom’ Christine depicts twice over spouting different decrees of tough love–’All I Care About is that You’re Happy, and a Doctor’ and ‘Garbage, I Call You that Because I Love You’– might then read to a wider audience as a distilled representation of the pressure inherent in the American Dream, and how this dream that often permeates the parent-child relationship in immigrant, first-generation, or minority households. In Wang’s words, underneath the academic pressure of the ‘Tiger Mom,’ is the burden of ‘classism and white supremacy.’ Wang references Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’ to explain how people of color migrating to settler colonial nation-states–ie. America–enter the ‘triad of relations’ between settler, native, and slave. In certain situations the refugee/immigrant/migrant is made criminal where in other scenarios, ‘given the appropriate investments in whiteness,’ the subaltern is invited to be a settler. For example, Wang cites her parents’ decision to purchase a home in a predominantly white upper-middle class suburb of Washington D.C. as one of these investments. Parents make manifest in their relationship to their children generational anxiety caused by capitalistic pressure.

The classic of American literature, ‘Roots,’ published by Alex Haley in 1976, occupied the top position on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly half of that same year. When Fran Ross published ‘Oreo’ two years earlier, hardly any copies sold, and the text quickly fell out of print. While the title of the first novel suggests an authentic, or ‘pure,’ origin story, ‘Oreo,’ an insult turned title,  suggests the pervasiveness of white supremacy creates ‘murkier, more polluted racial waters’ muddled further by capitalism. The white American experiences Capitalism like a fish does water, but the person of color–the posed and peeled banana, oreo, and coconut–experiences alienation on all sides. In Wang’s own analysis of the Harlow experiments mentioned earlier, she suggests that capitalism is like the ‘wire-mother,’ who offers only cagey, militant survival. When ‘Oreo’ was reprinted in 2000, the novel was met with praise for being ‘ahead of its time.’ One critic even called ‘Oreo’ a true twenty-first century literature despite Ross publishing it at the height of the Black Arts movement. Perhaps ‘Oreo’ does not seek to represent any singular or ‘authentic’ experience because such an experience is perverted in the settler colonial nation-state. Like Ross, Wang speaks hilariously, and often with a healthy dose of satirical deprecation, to the whiteness demanded of non-white parents by ‘progressive’ capitalism in which the success of their investments are contingent on how well their children can swim in whiteness.

Christine Tien Wang (b. 1985, Washington D.C) lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo exhibitions of Wang’s work include Banana Philosophy (2023) at PTT Space in Taipei, Fake Stupid, Queen of Cringe (2022) at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, Coronavirus Memes (2020) at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne, #cryptomemes: women and Leo DiCaprio (2019) at Ever Gold Projects in San Francisco, and Crypto Rich (2018) at Nagel Draxler Kabinett in Berlin. Wang’s work was included in recent two-person and group exhibitions, Bay Area Now 9 (2023) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Take Care: Art and Medicine (2022) at Kunsthaus Zürich, Screen Time with Luke Murphy (2021) at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Friends and Family (2021) at Magenta Plains in New York City and Climate Change is Real. Stop Procrastinating! with Mark Dion (2020) at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Munich.  Wang has completed residencies at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, VCUQatar, Chashama North, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Wang’s work belongs in the public collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Groeninghe Collection in Belgium. Wang received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in 2013 and an MFA in Painting from University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. She is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at California College of Art.

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