Who Are Orientals: Magenta Realism

About forty years ago, when Sharon first came to California, she was told that she was “Oriental. ” She was also told that certain tables and chests were “Oriental,” and that a particular decorative style was likewise considered “Oriental,” even though these things looked unfamiliar.

The works in this exhibition are largely produced in what she was told is an “Oriental” style or manner. They originate from dried Boston ivy vines resembling twisted tree branches, gathered after years of growth without human intervention and coated with an artificial magenta surface.

The application of magenta coating violently interrupts this natural index. Historically, magenta is among the first fully synthetic modern pigments, inseparable from industrial chemistry, mechanical reproduction, and the chromatic excess of modernity.

Here, color no longer functions descriptively, but operatively. The magenta surface transforms the dead vines into unstable signs oscillating between the imagined seductions of the “Oriental” and the chromatic excess of industrial modernity, between contamination and ritual, and between transcendence and artifice.

If the branches retain the temporality of decay, the color introduces what Jean Baudrillard might describe as the logic of simulation: reality intensified precisely through its artificiality.

The works also echo a reversed form of classical Chinese literati aesthetics. Where traditional literati painting often pursued “compression through weathered emptiness” — reducing the world into ink, void, and gesture — these works enact a compression through chromatic saturation.

The tangled vine becomes a condensed structure of historical memory, while magenta operates almost as a contemporary counterpart to ink: not natural, but hyper-artificial; not withdrawn, but aggressively present.

Suspended between objecthood and theatricality, ruin and ornament, realism and hallucination, the works propose