in conversation with brenda joy lem about her work, it is impossible not to enter a discussion about community.  it is within her community that she spends most of her energies.  consequently, the space she dictates for her art is not the gallery wall but the street stall.  for her, the work has merit based on its accessibility to her intended audience, not its careerist potential.  using this inverted triangle as her measurement of success allows brenda the latitude to practise art at will; the content dictates the medium. her visual art resume reads like the indexed catalogue for a small art college: filmmaking, printmaking, collages and installations are part and piece of her comprehensive approach towards the production of art.  when language fails, art speaks up.

it's an old photograph:       black and white and faded yellow.  the
first  (g)lance serves the contrived image: young woman, elegantly
(at)tired,   smiles generously  from atop the hubcap of boatsized car
    confident and rich in fortune.      with Her hair in salon-styled
ringlets and         a midwestern sun bouncing dappled gold
    off Her jewelled dress collar     She seems like a bygone
    advertisement     for             chesterfields and edsels.

          pure americana (sia).
(sia) spells incongruity.

                                                     on second
(g)lance         the starlet's pose doesn't sit well in the viewer's gaze,
        it is an asian face                 that beams out amidst
                these icons of a mono-white culture.
a bacterial culture, pesticide to the generations of rice padded, sea weeded bamboo shot migrants that cluster lonely along the rim of its stainless petrie bow(l).

i'm staring at this photograph of brenda joy lem's aunt marg.  it's been reproduced three times over, photocopied, silkscreened and d.p.i'd.  in its recycled state, the lines have softened into grainy edges spilling perilously into nothingness.  the net effect is much like an ill-inked daguerreotype.  stretching down beneath the width of the image is a brief (e)motionless text.  a numbered account of aunt marg's earned pittance from laundered labour.  this silkscreened banner ends with a primary schooler's flash card bearing a cartoon image of fire with the singed chinese character for the element.

it is one in a series of banners brenda joy lem has hand-pressed for a show entitled "Ngukkei: Family House Home."  the show, presented by the OS gallery of Open Studio, is part of brenda joy lem's residency programme at the artist-run centre.  each canvas banner is looped into bamboo-shank frames.  black and white photographs of family members have been enlarged and silkscreened to graphic posters of ancestral homages.  below the images are oral histories of blood kin, and found kin, which attest to the survival, collective memory and cultural dis-location of her community.  each banner is punctuated with a flash card bearing the chinese characters for elements in nature/life.  i felt almost as though i had trespassed, uninvited, into the greeting room of a warm family gathering.  but stronger still, i felt initiated.  for it wasn't too long before i recognized myself to be a distant cousin.

the theme of Family runs consistent through the work of brenda joy lem, as does the interest in Language and Reconstructed Histories; they're themes that weave together to tailor their own seamless rubric.  a child of migrant chinese labourers who  set(tled)  in this country during a time when legislation worked punitively to prevent chinese from establishing families is now grown old on this land.  she has become a scavenger of a sort; collecting stories from family members now aged, still strong.  she re-works their lives into salvaged art.
                she knows it is a  feat (head tax)
                that her family (bachelor ghettoes)
                has remained (asian exclusion act)
                strong (suzy wong).

the intimacy of brenda joy lem's work can be unsettling.  Her work denies the viewer that anonymity of the voyeur with which art is so often appraised.  why?  because her stated audience first and foremost is asian women, second it is her asian community.  when speaking to a sister you can not help but direct honesty, clarity and specificity into your communication.  to create artwork primarily for asian women is to profer a resounding affirmation of re-spect & re-cognition for their lives.  necessarily this is challenging work because it is work that disrupts the accustomed/ accultured/ gendered cycle of artist and audience.

E-Mail: mercer@interlog.com
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