Bird - View across Williamsburg Bridge from Tung Fa Noodle Factory and Bird - View across the Jacob Van Lennep Canal
Bird - View across Williamsburg Bridge from Tung Fa Noodle Factory and Bird - View across the Jacob Van Lennep Canal offer views of landscapes from Soi’s home in two cities of his residence. The miniatures are painted in silverpoint within expanded patterns used in traditional ateliers of craftspersons in Srinagar, Kashmir where Soi has worked every summer over the last several years.
These works retrieve sites important to Soi. One was his view from the Tung Fa Noodle Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn when he was living in the US in the summer of 1998. His view from the Tung Fa Noodle Factory—a decrepit factory building populated by artists—was of the Williamsburg Bridge, out across the East River into the Manhattan skyline. The other was from his studio situated in Amsterdam’s Old West.
The patterned backgrounds are gleaned from a wooden ceiling panelled in the Khatambandh tradition. Soi’s immersion with craftsmen in Srinagar has positioned the valley city as yet another important site for him. It is in such immersions that knowledge is shared and friendships are formed. The patterning in these canvases refer to the site and mark the migratory travel of patterns from Central Asia into Kashmir over the course of history, and now onwards to his studio in Amsterdam. They are laid on in a light, flexible moulding paste and thus rise above the canvas in low relief. The canvas itself is layered with an absorbent ground that gives it an absorption similar to paper, allowing the washes to show the trace of the hand.
Playing with isolated blocks of the pattern, Soi saw birds appear and he used this shape as a window upon which to render these views in silverpoint, a permanent medium used to draw in mediaeval times, before graphite became popular. The silverpoint drawings are permanent and oxidise over time, gradually becoming warmer, allowing Soi to link the medium to the use of photography within his work.
