Patience is the new ambition. Morality is the new transgression. Respect for the old is the new shock of the new.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, an artist living in Portland, stands patiently at the head of these non-trends, making work in clay, papier-mâché and video, among other media, that’s at once stylish and humble, simple and intense, of-the-moment and defiantly not.

Stephanie Snyder is the John and Anne Hauberg director and curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

Following is a correspondence they had between May and July 2007.

Stephanie Snyder: Jessica, I’d like to begin our conversation somewhere between art history and philosophy, and ask you about the influence of Asian art and culture in your work. I’m particularly interested in how you have been affected by your study of the aesthetic and literary practices of the Chinese scholar ....

Jessica Jackson Hutchins: I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Chinese landscape paintings. I love how the paintings are at the same time the evidence of the painter’s intimate and spiritual-meditative engagement with the landscape and invitations for the viewer to have their own wandering, and at the same time include all these references to the lineage of mark-making and calligraphy. That’s how I understand certain works by, say, Chao Mung Fu (c. 1230). Chinese landscape paintings are so different than Western landscape paintings or photographs that consume or celebrate space and are heavily metaphorical and symbolic. Chinese landscape paintings are about activity. Looking at them is not a static experience; you’re invited to have your own experience wandering through the space, separate from, but not unlike, that of the action of painter’s brush and ink. A lot of those paintings are almost athletic-looking. I’ve always intended my objects to be invitations to the viewer to engage in some kind of contemplative or generative activity.

I’m also inspired by Chinese Scholar’s Rocks, which inspire a similar active viewing, and if you get into them, they elicit a great abstract and really mysterious experience, with all these perspective shifts that are both physical and more conceptual. My favorite Scholar’s Rocks are the most banal—but they really are extraordinary—simple rocks sitting on elaborate, beautiful pedestals often of exquisitely carved wood, which just dwarfs the little rock. So that the real gesture is the display. The process of framing a banal object and inviting the viewer to project, create, participate in the creation of its meaning is something I have been committed to since the very beginning of making art. But anyway—looking at these rocks you can imagine whole vistas and landscapes. You can transpose yourself onto the rock, and then experience the shift when the rock returns to being this small object: a humble object offering a sublime experience. Looking at Scholar’s Rocks is one of my favorite art experiences.

I’m reading a book about a Chinese scholar and artist by Robert Harrist, my old professor [currently at Columbia University]. The book is about a scroll called Mountain Villa by a scholar-artist named Li Gonglin, in which the representations of his garden and grounds become an autobiography. Harrist describes this occurrence in 11th-century painting when there was a shift from depictions of common literary, political, and religious themes to depictions of private experience. Some of my current concerns involve exploring my own private spaces (family, garden, home) and how these seemingly mundane observations inevitably but sometimes mysteriously tangent out to existential meditations or suggestions of the sublime. In the video piece I made—A Plant Tour—I conduct a pretty mundane narration of my garden and those in the neighborhood that somehow suggest real longing and conflict, and the significance of the smallest acts.

I am interested in this turning inward and the belief that it has real aesthetic and cultural-political significance. The Chinese scholars personified this stance of rejecting the world in protest in such a way that it involves a simultaneous commitment to it. I’ve read a lot about Chinese scholars, hermits, and anchorites. In 2002 I made a piece in Norwich, England, somewhat inspired by Julian of Norwich (1342–c.1416), a famous female anchorite/mystic. Anchorites were recluses; a ceremony was held in which they were married to Christ and then they locked themselves away for the rest of their lives. People accuse hermits and religious ascetics of being cop-outs, of rejecting a troubled world and dissolving into a private spiritual quest. But an anchorite like Julian committed herself to a belief and an activity of deeply compassionate engagement with the world, and that test of faith and commitment is reminiscent to me of the faith an artist has to have. For this piece in Norwich I framed a big empty room with found pictures of ivy, birds, and flowers, etc., stuck into plaster-coasted scraps of wood wound around the room, door windows, floor, to create a marginalia for the room like those in medieval manuscripts. I wanted to frame the emptiness, and thereby the longing.

I think some artists remain in a fairly isolated practice, committed to some kind of search based on a faith that one’s work will have some meaning, that it will do some good—or that there may be some point to it, a point that is impossible to take for granted or to find proof of. I mean—the episodes of doubt are similarly agonizing and unresolvable in some ways to both the anchorite and the artist. Not to mention the commitment to poverty!


Relics from a Lonely Dinner Party, 2005: installation view at Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York.