ARTISTS TO KNOW: KAARINA CHU MACKENZIE
Photography: Nabila Wirakusumah
Creative Direction & Production: Bianca Jean-Pierre & Nabila Wirakusumah
Asia is not a monolith – how anyone could think a continent spanning 17.21 million square miles of land and 48 distinct countries is one is beyond me. Still, there are certain experiences and spaces that are universal. When I first came across Kaarina Chu Mackenzie’s Night Market series, I could hear the chatter of crowds, the slapping of fish on butcher blocks and the thin but pervasive buzz of fluorescent bulbs illuminating each stand. I could smell the smoke wafting from the open grills and the sweet scent of batter cooking in cast iron. The paintings were depicting markets in Taiwan and China, but I’ve walked through similar scenes in Thailand and Indonesia.
These unifying sensations became more poignant when we visited her at her creekside home in upstate New York. A painting of hands reaching across mahjong tiles grabbed me immediately. The clacking sound of the tiles being shuffled played instantly in my mind. The hands were hers, her mothers and her grandmothers. I had experienced the same scene in my parents’ living room in Jakarta years ago. It’s one of my favorite memories with my grandmother, who I lost this past December.
Cultural beliefs and political ideology may draw lines between us, but the senses draw us together. Kaarina’s work recalls moments of gathering and tenderness. It reaches through the haze of personal memory, and finds something universal. - Nabila Wirakusumah
Kaarina Chu Mackenzie interviewed below by Nabila Wirakusumah (SHEER Creative Director), Bianca Jean-Pierre (SHEER Founder), and special guest interviewer and artist Mwinga Sinjela.
Nabila: You're one of our artists for the Affordable Art Fair and we're really excited to have you. Your paintings focus on home and what home means to you. Tell us about your cultural background and these places that you're painting and what relationship they have to you.
Kaarina: I love to explore this concept of home. We might have similar concepts of home, which is why when I looked at what SHEER is about, I thought they also understand that home can be a vague concept of belonging. I always say that home, nationality, heritage, and culture can all be different. And mine all feel very different. My ethnicity, where my parents are from, where I grew up, and where I live are all different.
Nabila: Us international kids always had a spiel about explaining where we’re from. What was yours?
Kaarina: It depends who's asking or what kind of mood I'm in and how much I want to talk. I used to say I was from China because I grew up in Beijing. Home to me was where I grew up and lived for twenty years. Then my parents left and went to Taiwan. Taiwan has always been a part of my life. I went there every year to visit my grandparents.
Nabila: So how long did you live in China?
Kaarina: I lived in China from when I was five to 2016 when my parents moved to Taiwan. I started to identify more as Taiwanese which I never used to do.
Bianca: So what led you to that point?
Kaarina: It was both COVID and me establishing myself as an artist and wanting to create an identity that was more true to myself. I also started to use my middle name more. Now I lead with Kaarina Chu Mackenzie on my website and my art. Kaarina Mackenzie is a beautiful name but it sounds super white.
Nabila: Can you talk about your evolving relationship with China? When does that awareness come in?
Kaarina: I’m pro-democracy and free speech and I'm really proud of Taiwan and what that represents. That is my home. That's where I'm from, but it gets really complicated. This is actually part of the series I’m painting that my grandparents are a part of.
My family comes from China originally but during the Communist War, they escaped from China to Taiwan. So we are Chinese but nationally we're Taiwanese. My grandmother was born in China and raised her family in China and then they escaped during the war and raised my mom in Taiwan. Then my mom went back and raised her family in China, the place where her mother was pushed out of. So it’s cyclical.
Nabila: Where did that decision come from to raise you guys in China?
Kaarina: It was for my dad's work.
Bianca: We saw some paintings in your studio earlier where you depict these memories of you as a school kid in China.
Kaarina: That painting series of me at school is when I was super young and forming my identity. The Night Market series transports me into my twenties and thirties. My current grandparents series is more about the future and how I want people to perceive Taiwan and Taiwanese diaspora and identity. People don't really talk about Taiwan or know about its history.
“I love to explore this concept of home. We might have similar concepts of home, which is why when I looked at what SHEER is about, I thought they also understand that home can be a vague concept of belonging. I always say that home, nationality, heritage, and culture can all be different. And mine all feel very different.”
Nabila: You were telling us at your studio about what it was like attending school in China. If you could share a little more about that?
Kaarina: I think of it as a memoir series based on when my family moved to Beijing in the 90s. My parents decided to put my brother and I in a super prestigious Communist kindergarten. And we were the only foreign kids. By foreign I mean white because my dad's American. So I'm half white, but in China I'm perceived as white. Whereas here, I'm perceived as Asian, right?
Nabila: Exactly. In Asia I'm considered brown, but here in the States I'm not. There's this weird shift when moving through these borders where the context changes your identity.
Kaarina: That's the central theme throughout all of these different series is this borderless kind of identity. Searching for home, but trying to relate to other people's conceptions of home and how it can be whatever you like it to be or you make it up.
In this childhood series, I wanted to talk about my love for China, my love of home, and this place that raised me, but also talk about its problems with individuality. Creativity isn’t celebrated. Even from a young age with my brother and I being half-American, we have those independent values instilled in us. I want to be independent and do things my way.
Nabila: Can you describe for the reader the context of what we're talking about in this painting.
Kaarina: So in the series Let Them Eat Cake, I'm trying to articulate how uncomfortable certain situations were growing up at school. I'm showing my body language and my discomfort in these environments. One painting centers around these photographs of my brother and I cutting this random cake and it's none of our birthdays. We're surrounded by all of these kids and I remember asking my mom why are we standing and posing in front of this cake? She explained that the cake said “Huan Ying Xiang Gang Hui Gui”, and it says July 1, 1997, which is the day that Hong Kong was reunited with China.
Nabila: And separated from the British.
Kaarina: Yes, the cake said “Hong Kong, Welcome Back To The Homeland”.
Nabila: The agreement technically is that Hong Kong has fifty years of independence and that in 2047 it would reunify with China.
Kaarina: All of these places like Hong Kong and Taiwan are having their sovereignty threatened and I wanted to talk about that. I'm not a writer. I'm not a politician. So how do I talk about things that are really important to me? When you look at this painting, it’s just innocent children cutting cake, but it's super political. We then had to serve this cake to our Chinese comrades and we're the only foreigners holding the cake in the pictures. I wanted to paint that discomfort in the body language that you can see and then use that to talk about modern day politics. And that comes back to what's happening with Hong Kong, with Taiwan..
Nabila: And even what’s happening with Palestine. This idea of land ownership and what belongs to who.
Kaarina: Exactly. And a lot of people who identify as Taiwanese will say I’m just a Taiwanese artist. I don't feel so strongly about that as some Taiwanese people do because I had a very different upbringing growing up in China. I’m not as insular in one culture.
Nabila: That also speaks to your recognition that China is not the CCP. I know a lot of Taiwanese people who feel very strongly that they’re Taiwanese and not Chinese.
Kaarina: Oh yeah, it’s strong. It makes me feel like I don't even belong in that Taiwanese group. I'm neither Taiwanese enough, nor Chinese enough, nor American enough. That’s what I’m trying to navigate in these paintings.
Bianca: That's what I love about art, because you can process a lot of that through your creativity.
Kaarina: These were the life phases that I felt were missing from the art that I wanted to see.
Bianca: So let's talk more about that and the story of you becoming a creative.
Kaarina: The Night Market series started during the pandemic when I quit my job. I was a full time creative director in New York and partially in Philly. I worked remote for a couple of years and I was on the computer everyday.
Bianca: Were you painting during this time as a creative director?
Kaarina: Nope. I was just a straight up full time graphic designer.
I’ve always painted though, in my living room on the side table as I'm suffocating my roommates with paint fumes haha. I've always painted but I never took it seriously. I’ve always had artistic and creative jobs so that was never out of my reach.
When I moved upstate, I had the time and space to paint more. When do you ever have more time and space in your life? That gave me the momentum I needed and I started off with the painting Yangon Blue. It’s dark and beautifully detailed. It was a dark time and I was super homesick from having not been back home to Taiwan for a couple of years. I was trying to paint the sights and sounds of the Taipei markets and the food that I was missing.
“I’m neither Taiwanese enough, nor Chinese enough, nor American enough. That’s what I’m trying to navigate in these paintings.”
Bianca: I remember telling you that some of your work reminds me of Renaissance style paintings.
Kaarina: I love that you brought that up.
Bianca: It was a period where things were very dark and artists were taking these dark times and making them feel so hopeful and poetic.
Kaarina: You brought that up during our initial call and that was part of the reason why I was like, okay, she sees me.
I was inspired by the way that everyone gathered around the food at these markets and you can hear the sounds. This was also during the height of COVID and AAPI violence so I'm painting Asian faces and I'm putting them out there.
Nabila: Also the lighting you used in the painting feels like the dark is illuminated.
Kaarina: The night market is the light in the dark. You walk around the city at night and you see this shining light at the end of the street. The beauty of the night market is that it’s celebrated by all kinds of people of all ages and races. Everyone can exist there and get along. That's the feeling that I'm trying to emulate and talk about with home.
Last year I did a show at BOBBLEHAUS, which is an Asian-American owned gallery and store. I had a solo gallery show and activation called The Night Market. I displayed my photography and paintings around the entire store and curated an opening with all Asian-owned brands.
This beautiful chef came and made Taiwanese noodles, so we're all eating noodles around the artwork. I had neon lights in all different colors to emulate the night markets and I backlit the paintings so part of the light came from behind the art. I also had a soundtrack playing in the background featuring music you would hear at the Taiwanese markets that I got off of Youtube.
Bianca: Wow, the creative director in you jumped out haha. You were hitting all the senses.
Kaarina: I had to paint these in isolation during a time of instability so I was trying to populate a lot of people around these paintings which is how it was supposed to be done.
Mwinga: Your paintings bring out such a sense of community to me.
Kaarina: And you don't have to be Asian to recognize this. This market might not be in your home, but you can feel like maybe there's a sense of part of your home.
Bianca: Yeah totally. There are markets all over the world where people congregate and it's a respected tradition. You respect the vendors in the community.
Kaarina: And sometimes they feel hidden. Those are the people that are always there everyday. We don't always appreciate them or show that so these are the people that I love to talk about and paint.
Nabila: I also think it's interesting that you talk about being in isolation and that’s what brought out this pivot into being an artist, and not just a creative in a commercial space as a creative director.
Kaarina: Oh, yeah, that was hard. I’m still struggling with that.
Nabila: Well you were raised in China and you identify Taiwan as home. Then you were living in Brooklyn and now you’re an artist in Woodstock. How does it feel to have found that identity for yourself now?
Kaarina: It's actually the reason why I'm able to be an artist. Being from and living in different places, it feels like you're always in flight. When I moved to the U.S., I lived out of my suitcases for years. There was nowhere to just go home and put my suitcase down. That concept of having a home and grounding myself didn't exist for me.
I turned 30 and decided that I like painting. I like to make art. It makes me feel good and it makes other people feel good. It's hard to be an artist living in NYC and afford that life.
Nabila: And it’s space. One of the main reasons I stick to digital art is because I don’t have enough space in the city.
Bianca: Also the fast-paced culture here compared to the patience it takes to be a painter. I would love to know your process and how long it takes for you to work on these paintings?
Kaarina: Part of moving up here and being an artist was putting up blinders. You don't have distractions here. When I’m in the city, I want to look at all the shows. I want to meet all the artists. That's a full time job in itself.
Being here is self isolation. There’s nowhere else to look but your own art.
Bianca: Sometimes there is such a thing as too much inspiration.
“It’s actually the reason why I’m able to be an artist. Being from and living in different places, it feels like you’re always in flight.”
Kaarina: I got a part time job at Harana Market which is a Filipino restaurant/Asian grocery store. It's become a hub for the Asian/queer community upstate. Getting this job was a way for me to find community here. I wanted to tap into a purposeful community that I want to be a part of which is why I'm looking for more Asian people upstate.
Bianca: This reminds me of a story you told me about a gallery show you had out here?
Kaarina: I'm a part of a co-op gallery in a town nearby called Rhinebeck and it's me and like twenty 60-year old white people. I walked in and was like I want to be a part of this. Let's see what I can do to stir things up.
Then I had my feature show and it was so fun because I invited my family and friends to the gallery and I made 300 dumplings. I do a lot of cooking and art together and I almost made dumplings for you guys. A big part of me showing love is through food and art.
Nabila: How do you feel your work has been received by this older community of white people?
Kaarina: Oh, they love it. We had such a good time at the show opening because you had all these different demographics across all ages in one room. We were bonding and talking and it was Chinese New Year so we’re all just eating dumplings together.
It’s tricky finding more like-minded people up here because there aren’t that many full-time artists my age living here. I’m trying to meet more people and constantly searching for ways to do that.
Bianca: Let’s talk about your technique because we saw a lot of your childhood photos at your studio that you modeled the Let Them Eat Cake painting series after. And now you're working on this really beautiful triptych based on old photos of your grandmother, right?
Kaarina: Yes, those are my grandmother.
Bianca: You have a lot of paintings based on real photos. On your website, I couldn't tell the difference between some of the paintings and photography that you've done because your paintings look so realistic. Tell us more about how you connect the two?
Kaarina: I’ve always been a photographer. I’ve always loved photography. Most of my paintings, actually all of them, are based on my photographs. I think of it as different from other photographers because when I capture photos, I think of them in terms of a painting. The way the composition is, the color, the faces….
Bianca: What do you shoot with? Film, digital, or both?
Kaarina: I do both. I have a variety of paintings that are based on digitals and some from film photos. But then I got kind of bored. After a while I felt like I was just painting my photos. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to incorporate both.
I decided to put both of my mediums together and celebrate what a photograph is. And thinking about the paper of an old photograph and the memories archived and the feeling you get when you take it out of your pocket. It's all folded and it’s ephemeral. I also worked in publishing so I love books and that antiquated feeling of the paper, so how do I take that and put it into the paintings of these photos.
I take these old photographs and I print them out like normal paper, and I transfer them onto a canvas. I have this technique where I really get in there and I remove the top layer of paper so that the ink stays on the back and then I paint over it with oil paint. I do it in a very purposeful way, by filling in the blanks of the photos as if I was filling in those memories my grandmother didn’t have because a lot of her history was lost. These stories weren't told so how can we use a painting to retell the stories and fill in the blanks?
Nabila: And does that paper add a texture to the paintings? Or do you add that texture with paint?
Kaarina: Yeah, so I do that with paint. In Scales, you can see the texture on the glove that’s just layers of oil paint. But in some of my other paintings, there are little paper bits underneath, so it looks like a crumpled piece of paper.
Nabila: It's interesting because you’re filling in the blanks with paint but you're also stripping the paper from the photo so there's this process of removal too.
Kaarina: I'm trying to focus more on the process. To me, there was nothing special about my process. But now I'm learning that with art and being an artist that a lot of it is process. I didn't go to art school so I'm kind of educating myself.
Bianca: How are you pacing yourself as you’re painting? Since you're also learning as you go.
Kaarina: That series of paintings of my childhood has been going on for eight years. I've been painting that for a while. I think this grandmother series is going to be the same. It's going be a series that goes on forever until I run out of things to say about it.
“I’ve always been a photographer. I’ve always loved photography. Most of my paintings, actually all of them, are based on my photographs. I think of it as different from other photographers because when I capture photos, I think of them in terms of a painting.”
Bianca: We talk a lot about the digital pressure of being an artist with social media. Do you ever feel the pressure to constantly create new work?
Kaarina: Oh yeah, I can't even think about that. Posting on Instagram is really intimidating.
If I lived in the city, I would feel the hustle of having to constantly keep up and apply to shows and put myself out there. I'm not going to feel good about my paintings if it’s not really what I want to put out there.
Mwinga: In your practice, how do you prioritize what you want to work on? As an artist, I feel this urgency to work on everything at once.
Kaarina: I like to do different things at once. Now I'm working on personal projects and a commission I have for this windmill clean energy company. I love doing this kind of work because that's where I can put that creative directing background in corporate and try to visualize their prompts into a painting.
How do we talk about turbines and what this company is about in a beautiful, artistic, and poetic way? I took this snapshot of a woman who was an iron worker on the turbines. I did a photo transfer and then I painted a turbine into her eyes so she's reflecting values of the future of clean energy and what we want to see in the world.
I also do freelance graphic design work and personal projects like this grandmother series which is super personal.
“To me, there was nothing special about my process. But now I’m learning that with art and being an artist that a lot of it is process. I didn’t go to art school so I’m kind of educating myself. ”
Nabila: I wanted to go back to these beautiful photographs you pulled out earlier and the stories behind each photograph.
Kaarina: No one really knows the story behind my grandmother and these are the blanks that I'm filling in. She's so old now, she’s ninety-five years old. In the photo she's wearing this qipao which is Chinese. They colonized Taiwan, right, so there are lots of layers of history there.
Bianca: What does your family think of your artwork?
Kaarina: I showed my grandmother the paintings of her and she can't quite grasp it. But when I showed her she said “Oh, I'm so pretty.”
When I finally went back home, I recorded her telling her story. I have an audio of the story of her escaping on a boat from China to Taiwan. She told me the story of her hiding her jewelry and gold in her clothes. This man took her on the boat and helped save her and her family and she married him and had his kids. My grandfather had an entire Chinese family that he ended up leaving in China because he went to Taiwan. They didn't see each other for forty years because of the war.
I have these crazy stories that I want to tell that are not just in my family. The Taiwanese diaspora shares similar crazy stories but those stories from a certain period of time aren't told.
Bianca: And not having the privilege of being the storyteller or having the platform and freedom to tell your story.
Nabila: In my family there’s definitely a lot of unprocessed pain where it's easier to live in the present where there isn't all of this conflict and escaping.
Kaarina: If I could I would talk more about mental health but it’s hard in Asian families and communities, but stories do need to be told. And it’s definitely not talked about in art.
Bianca: Are you working towards breaking the cycle?
Kaarina: Even the other day I was painting and I started thinking about my grandmother and about her escaping on a boat. I'm thinking too much when I'm painting, right? I'm thinking about all of these things while I'm painting her face. And I feel like those stories and that trauma really transfers into the paint and that's what you see. That’s why the paintings are very emotive because they're telling these really painful stories that can't be told and will probably never be told because that's how it is.
Mwinga: Do you feel any sense of responsibility to tell them?
Kaarina: Absolutely. It's partially why I want to become an artist. I don't know how to articulate these stories with words and I'm not writing a book or a memoir about my family's traumas and histories. But I'm really fascinated by the past and history so I'm using painting as a way to talk about it.
I still have so much to do. It feels like I'm scratching the surface and I'm just starting to tell the story. I also have real world pressures with what's going on with Taiwan now. What's going to happen next year? Is China going to take over so I can't tell these stories anymore?
“If I could I would talk more about mental health but it’s hard in Asian families and communities, but stories do need to be told. And it’s definitely not talked about in art.”
Bianca: Well what do you envision or hope for with the future of your art?
Kaarina: I really want to do more. I got into my first art residency last year and I really enjoyed that process. I have never been surrounded by a lot of artists before. That’s part of why I'm excited for the art fair we have coming up. Up here, I’m quite isolated.
I'd like to continue doing more work on personal stories and exploring self identity which takes time. Once I can get a couple of those stories out, then I'll be more confident in showing people that this is my form of being Taiwanese. This is the kind of Taiwanese artist I am. It's neither hating on China and saying I'm only Taiwanese. It's neither black or white. It's kind of colorful. Then finding my way and figuring out where I fit in the art world is my next thing.
Bianca: I feel like you're creating your own lane.
Kaarina: Even people asking are you a painter or a photographer? Is it both? Now I’m trying to combine them both instead of being either/or. Which is the same as my nationality. It's not either/or.
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Photography by Nabila Wirakusumah
NYALLAH is known for blending elements of neo-soul, R&B, hip-hop, and West African rhythms while exploring themes of self-expansion, transformation, and love. With their latest project, R+B, recorded in phases spanning a near-death bike accident and an eye-opening trip to Costa Rica, R+B navigates relationships, desirability, and self-awareness from a black queer perspective. Through enchanting vocals and vulnerable lyrics, NYALLAH reminds us that desirability is not love and our liberation lies in de-centering ourselves and prioritizing collective care.