A Ghost Walks in Circles: Tahanny Lee Betancourt at Daniela Elbahara Gallery

Between the screen and the canvas dwells a nostalgic ghost searching for a body of its own.

This nostalgic figure never truly inhabited its past. Everything it longs for, it constantly reinvents as the stage set for family videos. It materializes in the oil and wax used by Tahanny Lee; it anchors itself in oriental ornaments that recount the story of migrants longing for their place.

In 1911, half of the Chinese community living in Torreón, Mexico, was massacred by revolutionaries and locals who accused them of allying with Porfirio Díaz’s government. The accusation was never proven, and the racist crime went unpunished. The artist’s great-grandparents survived that massacre, beginning a lineage cut off from the remnants of its culture.

The house of Tahanny Lee Betancourt’s grandparents —she tells me— was filled with decorative objects of Asian imagery: vases, folding screens, porcelain items with which they tried to fill the void of their cultural inheritance. A collection of false vestiges where nothing was ancient or passed down. The echoes of that scenography materialize in Nube alada, fulgor amarillo [Winged Cloud, Yellow Glow], an exhibition curated by Lorena Peña Brito at Daniela Elbahara Gallery.

In the first room, four paintings are displayed in the order they were made. In the second hangs Perfil y joroba [Profile and Hump]; I am struck by the contrast between the delicacy I associate with a silk hanfu and the clothing worn by the figure, which appears to be made of the same matter as the entire body: flesh.

That flesh dissolves in the following works, where the intention of a central figure yields to images without fixed position, like dreams seen through a 1990s camcorder, where amidst the darkness the anchors are flowers, silk, and cranes.

Tahanny’s work often emphasizes gesture, but in this series there is a particular attention to symbols. They pass through her bodily gesturality, resulting in a kind of glitch born from the physicality of her process: a function that scrubs images of Asian ornaments and overlays them in uncanny filmic lines—without narrative, yet saturated with memory. It is compelling to witness the transformation of the symbol—sometimes appearing as cliché—into an embodied operation of memory.

The artist draws on family photographs and videos to zoom in (I cannot help but think of the physical strain of reaching for a distant object) on these new vestiges. The color palettes tend toward the bluish glow of the screen or the warmth of an expired photographic roll. The repetition of this glitch within the composition reinforces in me the sense of witnessing a dream, and of being disoriented.

“A flying crane foretells good fortune,” I think, while standing before the painting Una grulla vuela y la otra no [One Crane Flies and the Other Does Not], where the pictorial space is split in two: in the upper half, a solid, heavy, stagnant crane crosses into the lower half, which, though black, feels light and open because the negative spaces left by the outline and form of a flying crane allow the raw canvas to breathe.

Carrying that sense of weight, I return to the first room, whereupon a piece of furniture that looks antique —on which one might expect a fine porcelain vase— rests a vessel that seems extracted from a gigantic human body. Made of wax, it holds two tall candles of the same material; I imagine the eventual melting of the entire piece.

The act of giving body to a reminiscence —serving at once as the rope that binds and the wick that threads through the artist’s family and political history— unfolds with an intimate theatricality. Tahanny speaks of the “vestigial act,” and I am intrigued by how that action takes shape in our own bodies and affective processes.

Perhaps what happens in private is perhaps always a performance, which becomes real until it adopts a body to make it its own.

— Mariana Paniagua

Translated to English by Luis Sokol