John Hee Taek Chae – good faith
January 28 – February 5, 2021
VCUarts Painting + Printmaking alumni John Hee Taek Chae (MFA 2020) presents good faith, an exhibition that draws on Chae’s wide-ranging skill as a maker and thinker in mapping out a complex ecology of faith, identity, and ideology. In good faith Chae combines painting, drawing, sculpture, multi-media, and digital fabrication with intimate family documents in a thought-provoking installation as multivalent—and ultimately as elusive—as the histories it surveys.
good faith is on view January 28–February 5th at the Anderson, Gallery H.
Chae will be on site to welcome visitors to his exhibition 12–6pm on Thursday, January 28th and Friday, January 29th.
From the artist:
good faith is a project that explores the ways in which ideology determines reality. It is an installation that plots and connects the historical and personal narratives that have constructed my sense of identity–narratives in which desires collapse, mutate, or converge when confronted with power, opportunity, or illusion. Within the installation, recreated world maps are hung next to photographs of family homes. Portraits of influential American Presbyterian missionaries are placed next to my grandfather’s accounts of clergymen performing miracles. Mottos drawn from pyramid schemes are placed next to rebel slogans from peasant uprisings. All together these components form a spatial timeline–a composite of imaginaries, excerpts, declarations, and remembrances associated with the reciprocating effects of evangelism, colonialism, and capitalism. By oscillating between the historical and familial, I hope to present viewers with the contradictions that result when tools of persuasion barter in false promises but also act as genuine containers of faith.