Art: Furen Dai, How Race Was Made?

Furen Dai - How Race Was Made? in ‘Force Majeure’ — Furen Dai - *How Race Was Made?* in ‘*Force Majeure’*

Artist Furen Dai’s How Race Was Made? (2019) extracts language (relevant to today’s discourse) from Census archives from 1790 to 2010, dating back to its institutional inception. How Race materializes as specific rhetoric printed or carved into suspended sheets of vinyl—but only when the questions asked by The US Census Bureau inquired about race or ethnicity—visualizing shifts in language from “place of birth” to “foreign country.”Dai’s work not only questions federal archives through the lens of the “othered,” it also sheds light on the ever-present xenophobia found in US nationalism. View more photos on Dai’s website here.

How Race Was Made? was part of ‘Force Majeure,’ a show bringing together 13 artists from China curated by Lu Mingjun recently shown at the New York City based Eli Klein Gallery. The curatorial statement addressed the definitions of force majeure or ‘superior strength’ in French.

Curator Mingjun states: “Artists often act and practice in a relatively absurd way, while their seemingly ridiculous provocations may reveal the power dialectics between the subject of an irresistible force and humanity. With cases of ‘force majeure’ emerging from reality and history, this show comprehensively demonstrates human fragility and anxiety, wisdom and courage, and limited freedom and ease under an inexorable force.” The exhibition ran from January 18 to March 18, 2020.

Read Ocula Magazine’s review of Force Majeure here.

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