David Chien

Road signs taken out of context can be read like Zen koans or obscure riddles to ponder for greater insight. For David Chien, the hallmark of a trip to the Grand Canyon was a sign that read, “Gusty winds may exist.” The message feels oddly poetic for highway signage, and the words seemingly impart something beyond road condition information.

Chien’s chance viewing of the sign became the departure point for his installation at Rice Gallery, gustywindsmayexist, the second installment in the gallery’s Summer Window series. For Chien, the expanse of glass between the two wings of Sewall Hall was “almost a wind tunnel from one side of the building to the other.” In response to the space, he created huge vinyl characters, frozen in mid-flight across the 16' x 44' span of the gallery’s window. The flat, angular, and blocky cartoon images of men are defined by thick black outlines. They wear suits and tennis shoes in an amalgam of corporate uniform and leisure wear. Tumbling across the surface, their Starbucks to-go cups take flight as well.

A 2002 Rice graduate with a B.A. in studio art, Chien developed his “everyman” character and his strongly graphic style in Rationale…, his editorial cartoon for the Rice Thresher. The images begin as freehand sketches that are scanned and digitally cleaned up in a computer drawing program. Lines are made sharper, edges become crisper, and the figures are filled in with solid fields of color. The artist’s challenge was to translate characters born in the column inches of a university newspaper to the square footage of an architectural space.

Chien, revealing himself as a child of the digital age, approached the windows as a kind of giant computer screen, with the layers of vinyl that make up the images analogous to the layers in digital imaging programs. But the construction process involved more manual labor than pointing and clicking. The massive window was papered over and the images were projected large scale and traced. The paper was then removed, and a team of seven people working over almost two weeks filled in the grease pencil lines with hundreds of pieces of sticky vinyl, painstakingly overlaid and rubbed smooth. Sections of color went on first, and then the black outlines were added. Chien had an inkling that the project might be successful when, during installation, he observed more than one rapt passerby walk into a wall.

Adhesive vinyl is one of numerous commercial products increasingly employed for fine arts usage, and Chien had seen Emily Joyce’s abstract, peel-and-stick vinyl “paintings” adhered directly onto a wall in a Glassell Core Fellow exhibition. He was struck by the visual potential of the material because it can be used to make crisp, solid fields of color with the graphic look of printed digital images. The same effect is far more difficult to achieve through a traditional medium like paint.

An engaging strain of the obsessive runs through this young artist’s work. While Chien could have used larger sections of vinyl to create his billboard-sized images, he wanted the viewer to experience the laborious patchworking that is visible only when standing close to his giant figures. The process adds a subtle textural component that a more slickly commercial, standard application would lack.

In the same arduous vein, Chien created a number of magnetic puppets to accompany the project. A blend of merchandising and artist’s multiple—a limited edition of an artistic object—the puppets were, in their creator’s tongue-in-cheek description, produced “under sweatshop-like conditions.” For two solid weeks Chien went into the gallery and sat down to assembly line manufacture the puppets. The images were printed from a computer, then the handwork began as Chien mounted the images on illustration board, cut them out, grommeted the arms to the body, and applied the magnetic backing. Chien sums up the experience as “the pinnacle of repetitive tasks,” describing the project as “carpal tunnel all the way.” Fortunately, Chien’s effort was duly rewarded, and the puppets sold out.

Considering the point of view of their 22-year-old creator, Chien’s buffeted figures could very easily be the artist and his fellow graduates as they are blown out of school and into the workforce still in their tennis shoes, desperately reaching for their caffeine. The forecast for the road ahead? Gusty winds may exist. Then again, maybe there’s a “Scenic overlook ahead.”

More of David Chien’s projects can be viewed at www.nakedgremlin.com.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer