Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

In The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, the viewer is transported to a landscape filled with objects made unfamiliar. A parasol protrudes from a wall, spinning with a hypnotic rhythm; a single blonde hair extension is attached to a tensor bandage held by a white mannequin hand; a room divider has been outfitted with pungent dried fish that hang from the screen’s top rung; a basket is retrofitted as a lamp. Adding to this dynamic effect, reams of colorful wrapping paper are pasted from floor to ceiling on the gallery’s east wall, and the west wall is covered in garish tablecloths. Throughout the gallery, sagging cardboard boxes that read “Product of China” act as supports for many bizarre and beautiful things.

221A is primarily concerned with the impact of design on lived experience. This exhibition highlights the high cost of low prices by showcasing products that make the trip from China to Chinatowns all over the world. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store addresses the way in which low-cost production strategies are enjoyed by the West and endured by the East, and the impact on laborers that is often obscured by the abundance of cheap items available in trinket shops in the city’s east end.[1]

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

The objects in the exhibition are tagged with prices, inflated only slightly from the price point we’ve come to expect—though they are low by fine art standards. The prices include the value of the original materials and the artist’s labor. Tran has transformed the gallery into a domain for both economic and social exchange, creating a snapshot of modern life influenced by mass production and mass culture.

The gallery is located in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and by sourcing products exclusively from this part of the city the exhibition also comments on the changing face of the neighborhood. This historical community, once almost exclusively inhabited by immigrant families, has witnessed an expected but swift wave of gentrification. An uneasiness haunts the changing blocks as galleries, condos, and trendy minimalist restaurants move in.[2] Vancouver’s Chinatown is also flanked by a site populated by drug-users and drifters. The area is considered Canada’s poorest postal code, yet so far the communities are working together to revitalize abandoned spaces and empty storefronts.

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

At 221A, The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store is the inventory of a shopkeeper gone mad, driven to insanity by the senselessness of consumption. Artificial flowers beautify the ugly reality that defines the gallery’s location. Baby harnesses are filled not with babies but with fake plants. A periwinkle fan spins slowly, acting as the lower half of an armless mannequin’s abdomen, whose eye peeks through a sun visor. It is perhaps not important what is for sale, as long as the impulse to buy is intensified and subverted, displacing the use value of the object and replacing it instead with pure aesthetics. A fruit-print tablecloth is wrapped tightly around stretcher bars to make a canvas, elevated to high art yet rendered unusable.

Ron Tran: The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store is on view at 221A in Vancouver through May 23, 2015.

[1] For more information about workers’ rights violations in China, visit chinalaborwatch.org, a New York-based organization that documents unfair treatment by international companies in Chinese factories. Also, for an example of factory violations in exchange for cheaper production read: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/05/workers-rights-flouted-apple-iphone-plant.

[2]For varying responses to the changing face of Vancouver’s Chinatown see, http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/news/metro/Battle+Chinatown/10384991/story.html?rel=10403843 and http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/behind-the-changing-face-of-vancouvers-chinatown/article7282156/

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Plate" from "Lamia" series, 2013. Dyed resin and fig.

Born in 1984, Yukihiro Kaneuchi grew up in Fukuoka, on the north shore of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four major islands. Fukuoka is a large city, larger than Kyoto but also very environmentally friendly, and Kaneuchi describes the place as “sea/forest/mountain.” At any rate, his hometown is not a “crazy city” like Tokyo, and Kaneuchi keeps studios in both places. He acquired the shell, cuttlebone, and fishbone for his new series in Fukuoka where his space is close to the water, but put it together in the capital. It is called “Lamia.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Knife," "Fork," "Spoon" from series "Lamia," 2013. Organic materials, thread, resin, brass.

Kaneuchi studied design at Tama Art University and graduated in 2008. In 2009, Benetton awarded him a scholarship to do a year’s research at Fabrica, their communications research centre near Venice. “Fabrica,” they say of themselves, “is not a school, advertising agency or university. It is an applied creativity laboratory, a talent incubator, a studio of sorts . . .” Their home base is a 17th century villa rehabilitated by self-taught Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and it was there, working as a product designer, that Kaneuchi says he learned products “can/must” have “criticism and motivation.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Fork" detail from "Lamia," 2013.

I wrote to Kaneuchi about “Lamia.” The series consists of four pieces, or “products”—a plate, fork, knife, and spoon. When he made them, Kaneuchi was thinking about the essence of a product, which he calls “first intention.” He will mention the oldowan: a hand axe and the earliest stone tool, it is has been around for 2.6 million years. But now the minds and hands that have historically finessed rocks, metals, and animal parts into objects of special use are participants in an “incessant” global production-consumption model. “We need,” Kaneuchi says, “to reconsider the value and role of products to avoid over-saturation, decreasing quality, and negative environmental impacts.”

In fact, I thought the title actively referenced lamia the ‘carnivorous fish.’ I took the unthinking hunger of that fish as commentary on our global consumption patterns. But more specifically, Kaneuchi says he’s referencing Keats’ narrative poem of the same title, in which Keats rails against Isaac Newton for “unweav[ing] the rainbow“—for “destroying,” Kaneuchi says, “imagination/fantasy/feeling/sense.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, detail from "Lamia," 2013. Resin-beaded on thread.

In “Lamia” we have some atavistic things, artifactual tools concerned with eating. But when ‘forks, knives, and spoons’ are meaninglessly manufactured, it is possible to lose sight of what it is they do for us. It is possible for human acts, assisted as they are by tools—now commercialized products—to depreciate. Though what could be more universally important than the act of eating? Kaneuchi approaches these tools not just as a means to an end, but as expressions of humanness in its simplest form. “Lamia” becomes a cerebral, elegiac meditation on the loss of that humanity.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Tiny landscape in a coffee cup," 2010. Stained ceramic.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi is talking about products that are well-made and -loved. He’s talking about the Velveteen Rabbit of eating utensils. It’s clear “Lamia” is a continuation of Kaneuchi’s earlier work. His preface to “Tiny landscape in a coffee cup” (2010), for example, reads brilliantly here:

When a product is created, it is as though new-born, with no memory or understanding of the world around it. These relationships are formed through user interaction over time; the product “ages” and gains knowledge of its purpose in the world. The stain’s image is a representation of the product’s feelings and memory as the product ages through use.

Recently, I was going to leave my boyfriend’s house with a noteworthy spoon. But I have been known to lose flatware in the depths of my car, and when my boyfriend saw me with the spoon, he said, “Not that one,” because it had been his grandmother’s, one of a few left. That scene came to mind when I found “Lamia” in my inbox. It is an ancient scene: humans and their tools, clever primates finding ways to walk termites out of their dens with sticks. We make tools and they make us human in turn.