Grass Stains, Summer Heat
When I was at an art school near Chelsea, from the windows of our department, I often stared at the building across from the water towers—people visiting an empty apartment, watching TV under the dim yellow light, or walking around the small rooftop garden. But it was always from a distance, as if the scenes were not in my real life but were from Edward Hopper’s paintings.
The writer Olivia Laing recognizes the inner loneliness in Hopper’s figures, describing New York as a “teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis.” But loneliness, or isolating oneself in a nice apartment, might not be the portrait of every New Yorker. It is an energetic city for togetherness; everything is happening without a rest: openings, screenings, parties. Friends would always ask you to take a walk by the Hudson River, go fishing near Coney Island, or have a picnic in neighborhood parks.
If you passed by Cooper Park on a July afternoon, you might have encountered four sculptures of anime figures holding fish or rods, seated in a composition reminiscent of Hopper’s People in the Sun. The well-dressed city dwellers in Hopper’s work were transformed into idle, relaxed young men, enjoying (perhaps after-work) fishing in the sunlight.
These sculptures by Amos Kang were part of the pop-up show Grass Stains, which happened in Cooper Park on July 20. The curator Seoyoung Kim organized an afternoon gathering with artworks, poems, music, and food, inviting people to unwind and celebrate the summer time.
In summer, community parks become more crowded. These places usually have their own characteristics: in Sunset Park, there are groups for tango and square dancing; in Greenpoint, parents chat on the benches while looking after their kids. Surrounded by artist studios in East Williamsburg, Cooper Park might be an ideal outdoor space for cultural workers to breathe fresh art and escape from spotlights and stained walls.
Everything in Grass Stains was moved from indoors to an open space, swaying with the breeze and casting changing shadows as the sunlight shifted. The show offered slices of joyful childhood memories, glimpses into the artists' kitchens or gardens, and threads from their working processes.
Janette Oh’s Seolaebang 설레방 mimicked her mom’s bamboo sheet for making kimbap, and Yulin Gu’s Jellyfish were made from plastic bowls found in Chinese supermarkets. Both Seung-Jun Lee and Jeenho Seo used paper, with the material’s fragile nature reminding us of the ephemerality of things. Most of the artists in the show did not share similar life experiences with people growing up in the Brooklyn neighborhood. And this is a typical part of New York: varied fragments of nostalgia meet in one place.
Artists added more vibrancy to this park setting. Joseph Torres produced a site-specific installation for brief meditation, where a snake plant was still growing. Inside jiwoong’s garden cart, living plants were placed on his ceramic pieces. Inspired by electric poles disguised as pine trees, Rachel Yanku assembled Tree with painted wood, humorously blending urban and natural scenes.
Basharat Ali Syed’s and James Warren’s standing sculptures turned our gaze beyond the horizontal and towards the trees, while William Kim’s fallen, entangled kids bikes and Jungeun Park’s glass pigeon drew our attention back to the ground—the grass at Cooper Park was not luxuriant enough. It reminded me of Washington Square Park, where Yulin and I celebrated our birthday together for the first time; we tried to sit on grass but literally soil, sharing one cake. The sparse grass in New York parks does not discourage people from having picnics. In Grass Satins, the catering tables prepared by Jamie Cheung of Edible Affairs brought bright colors to the park and a sense of Dionysian festivity: bread wrapped with ribbon, candied grapes in large martini glasses, and people sat or kneeled on grass, cutting fruit and cheese.
There were also groups of people lying on their picnic blankets, blowing bubbles and chasing them, or just standing and chatting. Some might have ignored the music playing from a DJ table, while four artists—Izzy Casey, Kimin Kim, DJ Malinowski, and Madeleine Young—read poems about love, vulnerability, and the sensations of summer. Grass Stains conjured more than a static exhibition. As part of the project of Site, a nomadic curatorial initiative operated by artist and curator Seoyoung, it joins the ecosystem of friend-community and makes a safe space for creatives and communities to come together, sharing conversations about their practices, passions, and hopes, or simply having fun while supporting one another.
Sometimes we might not be present in the same park, but we all know the smell, sound, and afternoon heat of summer. It is not guilt-ridden to spend afternoons walking and drinking with friends; as Joan Didion wrote, in New York, you feel you still have “all the afternoons in the world.”