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“The Bluff City Chinese: A 150-Year Photo Retrospective”

Photo: Courtesy Chinese Historical Society of Memphis and the Mid-South

In 1873, Sam Gee, an immigrant from China, advertised his laundry business on Third Street and Beale in the Memphis Daily Appeal. According to the Chinese Historical Society of Memphis and the Mid-South, Gee’s advertisement made him the first recorded Chinese-American in Memphis. This year marks the 150th anniversary since that advertisement, and so the Chinese Historical Society thought it prudent to celebrate with a photo exhibit, titled “The Bluff City Chinese: A 150-Year Photo Retrospective.”

About six years ago, members of the Chinese Historical Society began researching this history, says the group’s vice president, Dr. William Lee. “The first generation was dying, and we wanted to save the history because everybody’s got these stories,” he says. “And a CHS founding member, Emmi Dunn, conducted exhausted research on the Chinese history in Memphis.” This exhibition, sponsored by a grant from the He Family Foundation, represents a culmination of that ongoing effort.

The photographs, most of which come from private and personal collections, offer a composite, but not comprehensive, history of the complicated Chinese-American experience in Memphis. Indeed, for the first generation of Chinese immigrants, photographic documentation was limited, Lee says. “They weren’t really in photographs,” he says. “Like if you look at [historical] images of the transcontinental railroad, there’s no Chinese in the picture, even though they were actually the ones that did most of the work.”

Thus, an exhibition like this seeks to recognize and honor the long-standing presence of Chinese Americans in Memphis, especially as later generations were able to photograph themselves, documenting their own lives when the mainstream historical record neglected to do so. As Jinliang Cai, president of the Chinese Historical Society, adds in a press release, “This is not only Chinese history, but also Memphis history.”

“People need to know that we’re here in the community,” Lee says when speaking to the Flyer. “So we just want people to get a better understanding of who we are, what are doing, and how did we get here. History is important because you never know where you’re headed until you know where you came from. A lot of people say that, of course, but if you don’t learn from the past, you’re going to repeat it in the future. We need to understand the sacrifices that the Chinese had to make just to get here, the prejudice and hatred, the Yellow Peril, they had to overcome. Even during Covid, they had Asian hate crimes. So that’s why we’re trying to do this is. I guess, education trumps prejudice.”

As such, all are invited to the exhibit’s opening reception on Friday, which will include opening words by Cai and Jimmy Rout III, historian for the Shelby County Historical Commission. Refreshments will be provided. Following its opening, the exhibition will be on display at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library through October 31st.

Opening Reception for “The Bluff City Chinese: A 150-Year Photo Retrospective,” Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, Friday, September 29, 4-6 p.m., free.

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MoSH’s “Artificial Intelligence” Exhibitions

Two new exhibits at MoSH explore AI. (Photo: Museum of Science & HIstory)

We are all scared of the robots overtaking us. Is this a gross generalization? Of course. But if horror movies (*cough* M3GAN) have offered us any insight into humankind, it’s that a lot of us are a little bit skeptical of what has been dubbed artificial intelligence (AI) even though we use it every day, from opening our phones with facial recognition to asking Alexa to play our favorite jams. In most cases, you could even say we take AI for granted without truly understanding what it is or how it works. That’s what the Museum of Science & History is seeking to rectify, with two new exhibitions opening this week: “Artificial Intelligence: Your Mind & the Machine” and “Web of Innovation: AI in Memphis.”

The “Artificial Intelligence” exhibition has traveled throughout the country and features interactive displays that will demonstrate, for instance, how a computer recognizes faces or how a self-driving vehicle navigates a street. “It really tries to explain how the human brain and how computers interact in the world, and how our brains and AI will work in the future,” says Raka Nandi, director of exhibits and collections. “Visitors will learn about the history of AI, what it is, what it isn’t. … AI is really the way in which we try to make machines behave and think like humans.”

To accompany the traveling exhibition, MoSH has also curated “Web of Innovation,” which highlights the use of AI technology among local entrepreneurs and researchers, such as those at the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and even FedEx. “We tend to think that all of this is happening on the West Coast, but right here in Memphis there are innovators who are doing a lot of good stuff that is making the city better,” Nandi says. “We’re hoping that the local component, as well as the traveling one, inspires young people to focus on career-connected learning and to really think about how AI is part of their daily world and also how it’ll be a big part of their life in the future.”

Nandi adds that the museum hopes people of all ages will see and enjoy the exhibit with all its interactives that make complex ideas much more accessible (and fun). Prior to working on these exhibitions, Nandi admits that even she didn’t know much about AI. “I think we all feel like we understand AI, but we don’t,” she says.

By the time visitors leave the exhibits, Nandi hopes that they will also consider philosophical questions that might be raised. “Machines are using complex mathematical equations to recognize things, to make decisions,” she says. “But it’s just that — it’s math. It’s not a moral code. It’s not societal cues; it’s not social cues. Those are all human ways of thinking that cannot be mimicked by a machine.”

“Artificial Intelligence: Your Mind & the Machine” and “Web of Innovation: AI in Memphis,” Museum of Science & History, Sunday, January 22 – May 6.

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Lessons Learned

One of the most powerful and unsettling bodies of work in the Memphis College of Art MFA thesis exhibition consists of six small oils on panel by Kendra Bulgrin. In one painting, a cow stiff with rigor mortis lies on its side. Nearby, a chicken stuck in its own yellow-green excrement bends over to drink from the purple swill that drips down the panel. The work’s title — To turn from some gesture/that seemed urgently felt, but opaque/as a forgotten language — are lines from Susan Stewart’s poem “The Forest.” Bulgrin’s work speaks of the loss of animals grazing on family farms, of the cruelty of corporate farming, of a poisoned environment. Her hypnotic colors, devastated landscapes, and haunting titles ream our individual and collective consciousnesses to the core.

A 12-foot-tall, vaguely figurative bolt of satin filled with the pungent smell of decaying daylilies is the centerpiece of Erinn Cox’s Memento Mori. The installation also includes small, ominously beautiful pillows on which Cox has woven the design of several disease processes. A fisheye lens placed on the gallery wall creates the impression that we are looking deep into the body/mind of an artist whose work is filled with the dualities of existence — joy/pain, fear/relief, beauty/decay — that she experienced during a grave illness and recovery.

At On the Street Gallery through May 13th

Some of the most haunting works in the University of Memphis’ MFA exhibition are in “Ephemera,” Nancy Cheairs’ quickly executed watercolor washes that include an infant flying Chagall-like through the air, a woman on her knees praying, a headless figure in a pose of crucifixion, and a woman floating in infinite shades of gray. In Cheairs’ large, untitled oil on canvas from the “Floating World” series, a green aura surrounds an armless woman. Nearby, the branches of a tree reaching out like arms complete the body of the figure and suggest a world full of interconnection, healing, and grace.

In Just Desserts, one of strongest paintings in Jada Thompson’s MFA thesis work, a foreshortened body seen from the waist down relaxes into new growth. Graceful tendrils winding around the body are repeated in the curvature of the kneecaps and the turn of an ankle. Like Cheairs, Thompson finds her own voice, faces her own demons before she embraces the world around her.

At AMUM through May 19th

More student work from recently closed shows at Rhodes, the U of M, and MCA are too good to pass without mention.

Jeff Simmons’ Metal Construct 6 is part copper wiring, part vintage typewriter, and part motor and electrical components of an organ. This quirky sculpture evokes the cogs and complex wiring of a creative mind.

For his U of M BFA exhibition, Scott Fulmar has created surreal landscapes where Magritte meets Dr. Frankenstein. Fulmar’s computer-manipulated inkjet prints of naked and sometimes dismembered bodies are neither pornographic nor horrific but sardonic comments about an impersonal, industrialized world. In The End of Space, a woman is hoisted into the air on a sharply angled billboard. Rather than evoking a sexual response, she generates feelings of empathy as we observe yet another consumer being consumed by an out-of-kilter capitalism.

MCA BFA candidate Erica Page blew holes through three pairs of back-to-back cotton panels onto which she printed larger-than-life images of students and middle-aged professionals. Their expressive faces are powerful indictments: Viewers witness all the beauty, experience, and potential that are about to be compromised or lost. Slender filaments woven at the edges and across the wounds bring to mind the growing web of violence that threatens to enmesh us all.

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Feel the Heat

Day after day this summer’s heat indexes are topping 100, and this August is one of the driest, hottest, muggiest months on record. Instead of trying to beat the heat, David Mah decided to accentuate it with “Erotica 2006,” an exhibition/full-frontal assault on the funny bone as well as the erogenous zones.

Forty-nine artworks by 25 artists include paintings of Barbie in leather, a peephole (with a footstool for voyeurs 5’2″ and under), black-and-white photographs of nude Adonises and Venuses, and a beautifully crafted designer set of 11 milk-white phalluses all bending toward a small round opening at the center of Bryan Blankenship’s ceramic installation Wishing Well.

Mel Spillman’s It’s Alright If You Love Me, It’s Alright If You Don’t lies at the crossroads of pornography and fine art. A fine grade of untouched paper suggests flawless alabaster skin. Pools of red for nipples and a wide-open mouth, a lemon-yellow wash for hair, and a few fluid strokes of gouache and iridescent ink for nostrils, eyebrows, a collar bone, and the edges of the breasts complete Spillman’s vision of purely physical, no-strings-attached erotica.

This exhibit is not just unabashedly sexual. It’s campy, philosophical, and it broaches the ineffable. In Tim Andrews’ Eros and Thanatos (oil and acrylic on canvas), a youth in a field of red poppies is surrounded by Van Gogh-like swirls. He cradles his head with his hands — a gesture that suggests a flood of feeling and Eros’ tenderness as well as his passion. Crowned with a Byzantine halo, his lithe pink body glows with an inner light that blurs his features. Skeletons leaping with abandon beside the youth (a kind of memento mori) suggest that at transcendence, the physical and spiritual passions, rather than splitting off, are partners in a dance of remembrance and joy.

The subject of Jane I by Jack Robinson (silver and gelatin print, circa 1960s) is borderline anorexic and pushing 30. She straddles a chair that is as reed-thin as her limbs.

Eros and Thanatos by Tim Andrews

The curve of her back and ribs is repeated in the frame of the black bentwood chair. Dark shadows and ebony wood contrast with fair skin, blond hair, and light reflecting off ribs. Robinson’s repeated curves and contrasts create a strong image. The stories Jane I suggests are even more powerful.

The largest work in the show, a photo collage by Mah, David Nester, and Areaux, induces flashbacks. Stuffed behind the edges of a mirror, dozens of copies of postcards and snapshots reveal how dramatically “what turns us on” has changed over the years. From the 1950s, you’ll find ducktails, lots of Vitalis, and beach balls decorously covering the private parts of women with hourglass figures. There’s the “Mod” look of the ’60s, replete with white patent leather, bellbottoms, hot pants, and Cleopatra masks (or pastel eye makeup and frosted lipstick). And you’ll find some of the classics, including the centerfold of a nude Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug that appeared in the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan.

Adam Shaw takes us all the way back to classical Greece. In Veiled (oil on canvas), he sculpts the human torso with thick strokes of paint. Folds of drapery cover the figure’s face. Dark shadows along the edges of the pubis suggest the genitalia of both sexes in a beautifully executed work that resembles Greek sculpture and pays homage to the complexity of desire.

No exhibition of erotica would be complete without a ribald raunchy-and-red work of art. Doug Northern’s Tracing May — Tongue Painting (acrylic on masonite) shows a couple making love on a palpitatingly red mattress. The woman’s right foot stretches over the edge of the mattress and almost touches an electrical outlet. Her partner’s long purple tongue almost touches her breast. This electric-red and neon-purple painting counterpoints the exhibitions’s more reflective works and raises the temperature to torrid.

Many of the works express the fleeting quality of life and embrace the attitude of carpe diem. The lights of Val Russell’s ancient marquee still flashing around the barely-discernable letters “PUSSY” advocate sexual pride no matter how dilapidated the packaging. Bill Rowe’s red-and-yellow neon sign Don’t Stop hangs beneath an open-mouthed, eroded stone face that once gushed water in some outdoor fountain. Rowe’s installation exhorts us to burn our candles (or neon signs) at both ends. And his corroded fountain head, like the shattered stone visage in Shelley’s Ozymandias (“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”), reminds us that everything slows down, stops, decays — except, perhaps, for an endless succession of disintegrating and regenerating worlds. Ahhh … sexuality.