basing it on my own developing understanding of the place. Most of the things in the cabinet are not the stuff of exotic China. They are the most ordinary of things like the wedding favors or the charcoal briquettes used for cooking or the White Cat dish washing liquid. XC: Do local Chinese [in Shanghai] have a lot of exposure to your art? If so, what have been their reactions? CS: Unfortunately, I was unable to show most of This City, Daily Rising in Shanghai. I would have liked to have more local interaction. Local Chinese visit my studio pretty often because my studio is in a “creative industrial center.” Locals have less experience with art that doesn’t fit into traditional categories so at first they were usually very shy about my work. It didn’t make sense to them, what it was or where it came from, whereas most foreigners in Shanghai have a broader definition of art. Of course, the associations that local viewers had with the objects and the imagery were much stronger because they had grown up with a lot of those things. They would be surprised at some of the things they’d find in the cabinet drawers. They’d be puzzled how I, as a foreigner, had noticed so much of their culture that they knew but to which they really hadn’t paid much attention. One of my favorite experiences was with a young woman who could read all the characters on the cabinet; her mother practiced traditional Chinese medicine, and she spent a long time in my studio giving me a tutorial of what should have been in the drawers. After she told me all this, I regretted not having more curiosity of what should have been there so that maybe I could have tied in those levels of meaning. For example, the wedding favors could have gone into a drawer reserved for heart medicines, and made it more anthropological, but it was still cool to have someone who knew the medicine cabinet as a living thing. XC: It seems in order for an emerging foreign artist to gain any traction in China, they have to incorporate the local culture into
their work, in a sense, kowtowing to their adapted homeland. What are your thoughts on this? Are you wary of being placed in that “foreign artist” ghetto? CS: I approach that question from a slightly different direction because I sometimes look at the work I’m making and I think, “Is this really my work?” What I was doing before I came to Shanghai was really quite minimalist, very little color. When I look at
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