The Line between Drawing and Sculpture
An Interview with Sarah Sze

By Melissa Chiu

MC:

I always get this sense that one has to approach your work with a bifocal view, an approach we sometimes see in Chinese landscape painting. And in the past when we’ve spoken about it I know that you’ve referenced to some degree the pictorial devices used in Chinese painting. Can you talk a little about that, because I think that struck me as an unrecognized influence in your work?

SS:

One of the things that I’m really interested in working on for this show at Asia Society is the question of how we create space, how we describe space, and how we experience space. For example, in Chinese painting, I’m interested in the kinds of scale shifts that result from not having much of a middle ground. The looming landscapes often have very tiny views of the everyday. The result is a magnificent view of nature contrasted with someone, say, washing the floor or milking a cow. That shift is quick and dramatic. Also, the way you move through a traditional Chinese painting, space peels off as you move back; it has more of a theatrical presence, and I’m using that word in terms of theater sets. With one-point or two-point perspective, objects are not parallel in space and things shrink in space. What’s interesting to me in terms of taking the two-dimensional into three dimensions is that the Asian perspective is actually closer to how we see. It represents real space more accurately in that parallel lines don’t converge when you move through them.

MC:

This idea of perspective that you speak of, of being in a space, it raises the issue of how one experiences your work. My question would be, when you create a work do you create it with a particular view in mind?

SS:

For me the entire experience of viewing a work is always based on a kind of circulation or choreography through the space. This is something that I think comes from an architectural way of seeing. There’s a consideration of how the viewer will see it at every point—even what one sees peripherally when looking at other things. If I’m in a group show I always want to find out how you enter, what you will see first, what leads up to your experience of the work, and then what will you see last. The viewer’s perspective and how information is revealed to the viewers as they move through time and space are for me actually what the experience of the work is always about.

MC:

For most architects, their ideas start with drawings. And in the initial phases of planning this exhibition, we were really talking to you about revealing to people some of your thoughts, not just through your installations and works, but also through your drawings. So can you talk a little bit about what role drawing plays in your practice?

SS:

I think that my drawings, at least the ones made in preparation for creating a three-dimensional work, are similar to architectural drawings in that they’re mostly abstract, theoretical; they’re about an idea. They try and capture the larger idea. They’re much more about how a piece will grow, speed up, slow down, lead you to a certain corner, bring you back. It’s about the larger movement through the space. Drawing is really the meat and potatoes of most people’s artwork in terms of recording information and trying to figure things out. The first thing most of us do is learn how to use a pencil— drawing is the first thing you do artistically. I think for me drawing comes in many forms. Drawing is a tool in many ways. It’s making a model. It’s about investigating and describing. Drawings can literally be information to be interpreted; like strict architectural drawings they can be conceptual and relay a larger abstract idea or a movement. They can create the illusion of three-dimensional space. They can be pure mark and lines. All of these things are interesting to me. One of the things that I was playing around with in the studio with the drawings I’m working on now is using things like eye charts because eye charts involve perspective—by necessity and design they are about seeing and distance. In using letters of varying sizes, the chart employs a layered or shifting perspective much like Chinese paintings. This, together with your actual distance from the chart, helps us understand our ability to see. It is a drawing of space and in space that describes the way we see.

MC:

We’ve talked about the experience of your artwork, and yet when we think of your artwork it is as much about the site, the place, where and how the objects interplay with one another, where they interplay with the space, where they interplay with the architecture. And I keep on coming back to this idea of architecture itself.

SS:

When it works the installation is in direct conversation with the architecture and ultimately looks very site-specific, but it actually isn’t. For this show, I was interested in architecture and the idea of the wall and division of space. A curator I worked with said to me, “Your work is either below the ground, dealing with the very surface of the ground, or dealing with the air, but it’s always about the tension of the floor.” For me this show is really about the tension of the wall. I heard Kazuo Ohno talk about butoh dance, and he said that butoh dance was about three spaces. He said it was about the space of the skin, the space below the skin, and the space outside of the skin. That was a really interesting idea to me. He said that these spaces were equally important even though the skin and below the skin are not always what we think of as spaces on the same level as everything exterior to the skin. It readjusts your whole sense of priorities in terms of space. For me this idea of surface, what’s below the surface and what’s above the surface, is very interesting.

In my last show I was really interested in the idea of being surrounded or being inside of something, and in particular that the viewer became part of the pieces without making a conscious decision to do so. With many installations you have this feeling that you’re entering an installation and then you’re exiting an installation; there’s the real world and then the installation work. I wanted instead for this to be blurred and for viewers to discover themselves at the center of the work without remembering how they got there. This idea of being at the center of the work is also in this show at Asia Society—the idea of being surrounded and having this kind of horizon line around you and in a room. The horizon line indicates an exterior space, an infinite space, inside of which there is the wall and then the interior space of the room. These three spaces I think are a nice idea.

MC:

Critics and writers have tended to list the objects that you’ve used by way of an explanation of your work. When visitors view your work they often focus on a kind of taxonomy of objects. So what does go on in the selection of the materials that you use for your installations?

SS:

The installation that I’m working on for the Asia Society show is about seeing, so I’ve incorporated an eye chart into the work. It’s about the actual process of reading and sight and how three dimensions become two dimensions. I’m working a lot on ideas that have been central to much of my work, but I think I’m really focusing, closing down on a very specific line: the line between drawing and sculpture. How do you make a sculpture that acts like a drawing? How do you make a drawing that acts like a sculpture? What do you do with a drawing that you can’t do with sculpture, and vice versa? I want to make work that is constantly asking these questions. What’s really interesting for me about this show is that it’s really about the very profound link between the potential to describe space and the space between drawing and sculpture.

MC:

I’m just thinking about your practice in contrast to that of other artists. You’ve spoken about your treatment of the gallery or the museum space very much as a studio.

SS:

One of the things that I have come to is the idea of something being experienced in the moment—that it has this quality of being experienced live, like live music or a live sports event. The feeling that something has just happened or has really been revised up until the last minute. Hopefully, when the show opens or when the work is let out of the studio it has this quality of constantly being realized in the moment.

February 23, 2011
New York, NY

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Interview with the Artist

The Line between Drawing and Sculpture An Interview with Sarah Sze