The sculpture between them

[[{"fid":"741121","view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"107","width":"114","style":"float: left;","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]David Kurlander had been talking and arguing with Nina Luo during nearly four years of college. But there was a big gap in their discussions. Then he asked her about her art.  

By David Kurlander '17

[[{"fid":"741396","view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"452","width":"310","style":"float: right;","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]Since Nina Luo ’17 and I met in as freshmen in 2013, we have engaged in many tense and often revelatory discourses about Wall Street, activism, gender identification and the difficulties of trying to remain grounded at Harvard. We have seldom discussed, however, a pretty sizable elephant in the room: Nina’s dedication to and increased identification with the sculptural arts. The most likely explanation for this gap in our conversation is the sheer diversity of Nina’s interests. She has passionately pursued a variety of interests including consulting, sketching political cartoons and studying classical piano. Nina is remarkably humble and succinct when discussing any of these endeavors, and I am given to self-important blathering – so we don’t get to discussing her carvings and castings. 

I recently visited Nina at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in the second floor sculpture studio to talk about her object-based memorial to the Nanjing Massacre, a project that has emerged from her work in VES 132: Sculpture as In-human Beings with Nora Schultz. Resting on a table in front of Nina was a beige basket, formed by a skeleton of bamboo reeds and overlaid with papier-mâché bamboo papyrus. The idea for the basket is lifted directly from a rare black-and-white photography book in the Harvard-Yenching Library that reveals the atrocity: a December 1937 mass murder during which occupying Japanese soldiers killed between 50,000 and 300,000 Chinese and raped countless more.

Nina told me that her interest with the conflict comes partially from her family history; her father is from Nanjing, and his parents, who were in hiding during much of the war, avoided the atrocity but have lived with the disturbing memories of the occupation. Nina’s own attempts to mediate the harsh realities of genocide date back to her early life, when she first came across information about the massacre in the pre-trigger warning depths of the mid-2000s Google-PowerPoint highway. “In sixth grade,” she said, “I put these kind of images on a presentation, and all of the parents called [to say], ‘What the…?’” There was a dark and wistful acceptance – humor is the wrong word – to Nina’s tone here that did anything but belittle the tragedy. Instead, she was zeroing in on the awkwardness that we all associate in varying degrees to confronting the visual evidence of events so horrific that we cannot fathom the mindset of the perpetrators or the pain of the victims. 

[[{"fid":741131,"view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"257","width":"357","style":"float: left;","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]Nina’s desire to memorialize Nanjing was reawakened by a pubic art project she created for ARTS FIRST in May. Haley Rue, a riveting young classmate, died the summer before our sophomore year while exploring a river in Germany in conjunction with the travel writing group Let’s Go. To honor her close friend, Nina created a flowered gateway over the entrance to Adams House in reference to Haley’s continued presence in our lives. “Most of my art has to do with intimacy, violence and mourning,” she said.

The sculptor references two artistic influences that have helped her uncover new methods for accessing this grief. The first is the work of Doris Salcedo, whose show The Materiality of Mourning is up Nov. 4, 2016-April 9, 2017 at the Harvard Art Museum. Salcedo’s installations often take the form of large alterations to a built environment that concerns collective mourning. For example, Shibboleth, a 167-meter crack in the floor of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, acts as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in Europe. Nina does not mince words about Salcedo’s influence: “She’s actually my favorite artist of all time, the master-planner of all public interventions.” Nina’s second aesthetic inspiration is based on the Chinese funereal tradition in which mourners burn papier-maché objects made of joss paper, the bamboo-based, ephemeral substance that Nina is using to craft her found objects. 

[[{"fid":741136,"view_mode":"default","type":"media","attributes":{"height":"370","width":"292","style":"float: left;","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]While the initial incarnation of Nina’s project was due within a week of our visit, her eventual aims for its scope and performance are ambitious and combine a Salcedo-esque desire for public reckoning with the cathartic burning of the joss paper ritual. She soaked the bamboo reeds in an orange bucket and bent them around the frame of a bowl whose form she spotted in the background of a burned-house photo from the Nanjing book. Nina told me that she hopes eventually to craft 50 found objects from primary sources about the massacre alongside 50 objects lifted from her own life: laptops, clothes, utensils. With this “time jump,” she hopes to show the difference in priority and access in her life versus the lives of those who experienced such trauma 80 years ago in Nanjing. Once she has completed the painstaking construction of the objects, Nina plans to set the objects ablaze, capturing the incineration on a video loop that would run alongside a Plexiglass box containing the ashes. 

Over the course of our 20-minute talk, Nina showed me photos of some of her other sculptures: Our Condolences, about sexual violation, and How to Raise a Child, a swing set whose seat has been replaced by a chastity belt as a disturbing commentary on child-rearing. The work, while profoundly unsettling, had an oddly therapeutic effect. 

It became clear to me that Nina has an outlet with which to deal with the more upsetting elements of her own experience and with shared collective pain. Her work – and the discipline and consideration with which she brings to it – offers some sharp relief to confusion.