BY WENDY BOWMAN BUTLER
November 16, 2020


I am embraced by warm yellows and whipping green leaves as I enter artist Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s tranquil backyard. Her two chihuahuas are lounging on the patio guarding the entrance, barking, and quickly wagging their tails for head scratches. Jennifer’s garage studio opens up into the yard blurring the interior and exterior boundaries. Shelves of objects line the back wall—each one with its own experience. 

Jennifer smiles as she greets us radiating positivity, grace, and a fierce depth of intellect. She is refreshingly open about her life and extremely cohesive in conceptualizing each piece I view. Her work perches delicately at first glance yet unfolds in potency the longer you sit with it. She creates pieces that initially come from her own experience, but also seem to carry the greater weight of the shared human experience transcending time and space. One could almost assign a sort of magic to her ceramic pieces that emit stories of history, identity, heritage, and emotion packed into a tiny porcelain object. After talking with Jennifer I found that she, herself, is much like her work—revealing layers of complexities and wisdom the longer you sit with her.

WENDY BOWMAN BUTLER: This is seriously the most serene setting.

JENNIFER LING DATCHUK: This is why we fell in love with this house. It’s really peaceful.

WB: I feel like we’re not in Texas right now.

JLD: Yeah, and we are—downtown is right there!

WB: I almost feel like we could be in Guatemala or something.

JLD: In the morning it’s so nice because all the birds are singing, all the neighborhood cats are out sitting on their perches, and a few weeks ago this vine was all the way over here and it was bright pink. The grass was green and now the lemon trees are all budding if you want lemons.

WB: I would love some lemons. What a treat! 

WB: So I like to start with when and why did you start making your work?

JLD: It’s funny to have to reflect back on that because when you’re in it, you’re just trying to get through it and keep going. As a child I loved art and even though I grew up partially in Brooklyn, New York and Ohio, I didn’t go to my first museum until maybe I was in college.

WB: Wow. Why was that?

JLD: I went to a public school in Brooklyn that is the un-coolest part of Brooklyn in Bensonhurst.

WB: I know Bensonhurst. I have some friends from Bensonhurst.

JLD: [Laughs] Yeah. People usually don’t know anything about it and that’s where they filmed Saturday Night Fever. The elevated train too in the background. But Why did I start making my work and when? 

I’m the first person in my family to go to college and I thought I should be what my family wanted—to be a doctor or a lawyer. In some ways, what every good Chinese daughter should do. It was in some ways a title and a pathway to success in the world. It wasn’t until I took my first art class that I feel like my whole world flipped and changed. Studying pre-law I felt like laws are so black and white with nuances that you can fit to what you’re arguing. It wasn’t until I took art that I felt like I saw the world in color. I fell in love with it. I had great supportive teachers at a really small regional college campus in Warren, Ohio. I found my niche and my people. I just kept going. 

I went to grad school knowing I still needed to learn more. It was also a way for me to get out of Ohio and see more of the world and the country. It opened up more experiences. I was trying to make work about my story, my family’s story, about identity, about being biracial, or being half, or both. I didn’t see those stories reflected in the artists I was learning about. 

WB: That’s interesting.

JLD: Yeah and I didn’t have teachers that looked like me either. So partly me being here is making sure my story and the people that come after me matter and are included in art history and the history of the world. 

WB: As if you felt you had to take control and play a role for yourself and for your culture—your biracial culture too. To give more people that are like you the opportunity to perhaps someday see you and look up to you. 

JLD: Oh yeah and I think every artist hopes for that—that their work matters or means something to someone or that you just even touch or affect one person. Making work from this perspective of being half or both—I say it’s like the division and multiplication of identity. But then I also exist in this idea of being in a third culture, which is very distinctly unique and many people experience this too. Your story isn’t even reflective of your parents or even within your own family. We all navigate these experiences. I am always trying to make sense of what it means to be an American. I think the objects I make are examining that, asking questions and disentangling histories, recasting stories. I am always in some ways looking back in the past to make it present the personal is political. I can never run out of ideas because all of this is so heavy. I think it’s about having the difficult conversations.

WB: You touch on the concept a lot in your work and I am also fascinated by this myself that we’re super divided as a society yet is our shared existence as sentient beings who feel pain, loneliness, joy, celebration, fear etc. that actually create us all as equal. How does that paradox of societal division and psychological unity play out in your work and personally for you?

JLD: Ooo that’s a great question. I bear the weight of that all the time in my practice but even how I navigate my daily life as an artist but also an educator. Our experiences aren’t monolithic. My experience growing up as Chinese American isn’t one node. All of our experiences are deeply complicated in how we navigate depending on where we live, work. Even what we eat or who we associate with. In many ways we have more things in common than we have differences. I think one artwork will not change the world and one artist might not, but I think collectively we can.

We provide the visual record and history of the world. At the start of this pandemic, I felt deeply overwhelmed. One, that I teach art and how do I engage with students and keep them motivated to know that this is super important when I didn’t feel it. I questioned what was the purpose of art when we had a pandemic and social injustice and global unrest. It took me a while to also listen to what I was telling my students that this is super important because if artists stop making work then we have no visual record of what is going on. 

I so deeply admire artists who keep engaging and asking those questions because we’ve been taught one idea of what art is and that it’s hegemonic, it’s singular, it’s primarily white, it’s male. Being on a college campus, going to an art school, or teaching at an art school, the classes are primarily female and all the teachers are male. So what does that say? You see a giant gender imbalance but there’s also a huge race imbalance. These are ways we can increase representation so that way we can dismantle this hegemonic art world. 

WB: Having the conversations too about the psychological, emotional things and realizing when you strip everything away, when you strip all of our identifiers away, that actually we feel the same way. It’s so important and I feel like you express that in your work which is why I asked that. You can unify people in that way.

JLD: I think about all the ways we put our stories out into the world and probably social media is the most accessible but even that is flawed and problematic. I follow a lot of artists and we often share the good things and we’re not sharing the struggles.

WB: But you are. You’re taking a leap to do that and I really admire that a lot.

JLD: Thank you. I think partly that’s because I want a sense of community outside of my small bubble. As someone who is biracial, the daughter of an immigrant, who makes work about identity, being a Chinese American, dismantling the model minority myth, about being a woman. It’s so much that I feel like I have to put my bio, or everything about my lived experience out there so that there is a better understanding of my work. I wish it would get to the point where I don’t have to do that all the time. I think it’s also important to see, especially in my students’ age or younger artists, that there are places to tell your story, and one way to do it for me is social media so I can actually control my story in some ways.

WB: Absolutely, I think social media is really positive for people who are actually making work. I think it can get really negative for people who are on there and it’s a time suck. It’s good to actually be able to have the access, especially for me as a photographer primarily, to see what other photographers are doing across the world. When in any other time have we been able to do that? That’s the positive side. 

JLD: Oh for sure, and I think going back to sharing the hard things—I just want to see or know that people are human. I think that’s super important. I love when I can see someone’s success and celebrate them but I also want to be able to know if you’re going through a hard time and let me know how I can support you. Those have been the best conversations.

WB: That’s amazing. I am so glad you are doing that.

JLD: Thank you.

WB: What is the importance of porcelain in your work both conceptually and as a material?

JLD: Porcelain has been my one true love. It’s super solid in my heart. Every idea and everything I make—it starts from that. I went through school and I was really lucky we had one ceramics class at this really small regional campus I went to. With 2D works I always struggled with how to start on a blank piece of paper. It was overwhelming and I don’t think I was really good at it but when I took sculpture, seeing things in 3D it makes more sense to me. Once I touched clay for the first time and saw it was malleable and I could do anything with my hands to manipulate it, I loved how I could affect it that way.

There’s also a super nerdy side to ceramics that totally satisfies both parts of my brain. There’s the creative part but then there’s the technical part of the firing, the glaze calculation, the clay formulation, the process of putting it through the kiln, the chemical process of what happens when it’s in the kiln, and then also I can spend weeks making something and I can still blow it up in the kiln. It teaches you a lot about loss. How you recover from those things are really giant metaphors for life. Every student starting out in ceramics starts out with an easier stoneware or darker clay because students have more success building with it. It wasn’t until I touched porcelain, which was obviously smoother, a different color, finer—that I fell in love with it. Then to learn more about its history and where it comes from, it really became a way for me to work within my cultural heritage, really embrace it, and in some ways learn more about what it means to be Chinese. 

Porcelain was first discovered in China over 2,000 years ago. When it traveled along the silk road it became the most desired and coveted material and object all over the world. It was worth more than the price of gold. I can’t even imagine what that means now in a capitalist society. Knowing that there’s such an amazing history of it and then to be fortunate to travel back to Jingdezhen where porcelain was discovered. There’s so much I learn from it and gather so much inspiration from it. People still work the same way with it.

WB: That’s so crazy that the material sort of discovered you in a certain sense.

JLD: I think one thing too traveling to Jingdezhen still knowing that this one city is known for porcelain production for thousands of years is still really amazing to me. But outside of Jingdezhen is Guangzhou, which is the major port city where all the porcelain traveled from Jingdezhen through Guangzhou and that’s where my family is from. So I partly feel like there has to be something in my DNA or blood that knows this.

WB: That brought you there.

JLD: Yeah.

WB: That’s so cool. Also, how does color play a role in your work too? 

JLD: One thing I talk a lot about is porcelain and how that desire for whiteness as a material was coveted around the world but I use it as a metaphor for the desire of whiteness as a privileged racial class and that is throughout the world. So showing a material that is dainty, white, perfect is also extremely resilient, strong, and complicated. The dualities of that mean a lot to me. The blue and white porcelain decoration that is seen a lot in Asian ceramics…

WB: And seen a lot here in Western culture too because of the adoption of it.

JLD: Yes! Oh and knowing too that blue and white Willow ware is the most appropriated pattern in the world. Even breaking down that in terms of classism too is super interesting, like who owns these things? But I often think about these subtleties in my work—it’s white, it’s blue and white and I’ve been moving into a red and white. There is the red, white, and blue—the colors that define what it means to be American. These are all underpinnings in my work. 

WB: And how we tether meaning to color because of these institutions, or these flags, or these governments, or history. But it’s so subtle in your work and it even comes out as pastel in some pieces. It seems like that’s another concept that’s wrapped up in there too. We don’t really know when we’re being manipulated by a color or how its tethered to something. 

JLD: I think culture and ethnicity have different associations with color. I grew up knowing white was a color of mourning and I think that is also a layer in my work too. I am mourning many things of trying to understand the sense of identity. Mourning girlhood and that transition into womanhood. I like to think it is this really complicated onion pealing back. I get a lot of grandmas who love my work. [laughs] I love grandmas, but then when they sit with it they see, ok there are some things wrong here, or a little complicated and I like that.

Red in Chinese culture is good luck, a symbol of wealth, you always have red in your house. But then realizing now how it’s so tied to anger and passion. It is really bright so for me moving that way I think is also me acknowledging and being unapologetic of the things in my work that I want to talk about. 

I am at this point right now in my work where I have a break to let new ideas marinate and work on new work, which is exciting and terrifying all at the same time. But also I am definitely impacted by what is going on in the world of navigating this time as a teacher, of what more I can do.

WB: It’s a lot of responsibility to yourself, to your students, to paying attention to what’s going on in the world.

JLD: Yeah, and I think it’s partly knowing where I started or where I came from and knowing now that I do have some privilege—what am I doing? How am I using it? What am I doing to empower others?

WB: Where do you think consciousness comes from and your ideas? How do you define that? We don’t know what consciousness is technically and I always think it’s interesting when I’m talking to anybody who’s writing music or creating artwork. We get into these flow states when we’re making work and it’s hard to figure out where these ideas are coming from so I’m curious where do you think your consciousness and ideas come from?

JLD: I think that’s been the hardest thing to figure out during this time. My biggest source of inspiration or where I can shut my brain off to let that happen is because I spend a lot of time visiting antique stores or thrift stores. I spend a lot of time wandering with no goal but just to look at objects on shelves. 

WB: Rikki told me she does that a lot too for her work.

JLD: Yeah, my favorite place in San Antonio is Charlotte’s Antiques on Austin Highway. I used to tell people about that place but they lived in Austin and they would come buy all the stuff and resell it there and I used to think ok that’s not the point but then there’s so much stuff there that honestly if everyone shopped at that store, there would still be stuff. When she was 80 years old, Charlotte was having an 80% off party because she was going to retire but now she’s like maybe 90. So she never retired and they opened another building for more overflow of stuff. In some ways that is the best ceramic museum in San Antonio because every form of slip production ware from Wedgwood pottery to German steins to English steins sculpted like George Washington. To me, it’s a place to go and just wander, pick up things, touch things. I’ll see something new and then go home and research it and that’s the part I miss the most.

The one thing I miss too is going to Asian grocery stores. There are a few here in San Antonio but the ones in Houston are so big—and the houseware section! Or just wandering and looking at the different versions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese soy sauces—the labels and the patterns on them. This time forced me to confront how do I come up with ideas when I can’t be in other spaces? I found that I was missing a chunk of the important part of how I do research and that just translated to my spending more time on E Bay looking at things. 

I also don’t think you can force ideas. Before all of this I felt like I was stuck in a grind. I was just trying to meet deadlines. I was spending so much money on shipping things over night because I was pushing deadlines to the very last minute. I was making pieces, I wasn’t making a new body of work. I was still super proud of those pieces but I just really wanted a break so in some ways this provided it. I forgot in some ways what it was like to turn my brain off to just be. To just be present every day in what I was doing and not worrying about I don’t have anything next month, I don’t have anything in the next six months, I don’t have anything in the next year and you know what, this is a good thing. 

WB: I felt the same way even as I was saying to you before about being able to start painting again and separate my studio out from my editing office. Now I actually created my studio down at Mercury Project into a space where I can get a little messier and explore a little bit more. My muscle memory is coming back from doing painting. I hadn’t consistently done it since 2016 or 2017. When you have to isolate, you kind of realize what you can do in isolation, which for me was painting because I couldn’t photograph people for a little while there.

JLD: I think this is what makes artists so amazing because they can be extremely resourceful. I’m trying not to use the word pivot all the time because it’s been used so much, but how we adapt to this… I don’t want to call it a new normal because normal wasn’t good.

WB: This era.

JLD: Yeah, so I think I just went back to the things that I do love— that are still so connected to my practice, like cooking. Ceramics is such a communal field because we all make pots, we all cook, we love to eat, we love to drink, we love to celebrate at the table, so that’s been hard. My husband and I have just been thinking how can we make a meal for a family of two that is really amazing with the staples that we have in our pantry so it was like a game of chopped every night. I just went back to my studio and had never taken the time to organize it. I would just put things in boxes and shove it in a corner. Going through my stuff, I realize I have a lot of stuff, I hoard a lot of things I collected for future ideas. It was good for me to sit with my hoarding and think about using the things I have already. All artists don’t really like to clean their space and organize it. My work is so white and perfect or bare and I really want people to know that my space is anything but that. 

WB: The objects therefore stand out inside of it.

JLD: [Laughs] yeah! 

WB: I don’t like cleaning my studio either.

JLD: Right now I am teaching from home partially and I have 3 different colored clays in my space so I don’t contaminate the porcelain area.

WB: It’s so important. It’s so hard to get that stuff out. When I painted for Sarah Morris we would use these little razor blades to pick hairs out and stuff and now I find myself doing it with my paintings because it was how I was trained. That studio had to be super clean all the time. No paint anywhere and so now I feel like I’ve kind of adopted some of that stuff and I am putting plastic on my paint table and I’m like what am I doing right now? It is really a challenge to keep it all clean. 

JLD: I compare it to—you had a really great party and you come away from it being so happy, and seeing the aftermath of it is all visual clues to the great memories you made that night. Then when you clean it up, it all kind of goes away. So I feel that way in my studio sometimes after I finish a project or an exhibition—cleaning it up is the final exclamation point of it. It’s done.

WB: How do you balance concept and your technical process? Is one more important than the other?

JLD: I am definitely not an artist who walks into the studio and just touches things and starts making things and is really intuitive. I feel like in some ways I let people down or break their hearts when I tell them that I am an artist who does a lot of research first. Whether it’s researching the history of an object, where it’s coming from, how it’s made, how it lives in pop culture, current culture, who’s culture does it live in? Who owns it? I’m asking all these questions of these things I’m looking at. What part of my personal experience or lived experience does it come from? And what is the message I am trying to say? I walk into the studio with that as a plan.

Then I work from, OK do I need to make a prototype? Then do I need to make a mold? That’s when the technical parts come in because I ask how to I create the foundation of the piece. I ask those questions along the way of what is the surface? The decoration part is a whole other set of techniques. In some ways working with porcelain or even working with clay for so long, there are no surprises to me in the technical part of the process. I know what to expect.

It’s the part of my practice where I do performance or stage photograph and do the documentation—that is the part I get the most nervous about in terms of I don’t know if it’s going to work. In my head it sounds like a good idea that I’m performing or I’m working with a photographer that I need to know how to communicate what I want translated through this other medium. That’s when the technical parts are overwhelming to me because it’s a little out of my control. The porcelain part, the hair part, I know what to expect, which is good to be at a point where I know that now. 

I was talking to a friend who is just starting to do ceramics and it’s refreshing to hear they are so excited when they open the kiln and it’s like a giant surprise. Just amazed that clay can do this if you pinch too hard or you hit it with your fist and how your body can push it around. I kind of forget those things because I’ve been doing this for so long. 

WB: But you remember them too in a certain way, because you were talking about that moment when you first did ceramics too. It’s interesting that memory is still visceral for you. I can tell by looking at your work, and I was assuming that would be your answer, because everything is very meticulous and very planned out. There are so many layers of meaning behind it, that I would expect no less than you to have done a lot of research behind the ideas.

JLD: I also think it goes back to the fact that ceramics is so communal that we share a lot about how we make things. Even I still sometimes go on YouTube and I’m like you know what I forgot how to do this.

WB: Oh I do that too with video editing all the time.

JLD: Yea. I am so thankful for this community of artists that don’t keep things to themselves. It’s so important to share the things we learn. I also think that people may make blue and white eyebrows after I made them but they won’t make them the way I do. So I actually kind of love seeing people’s versions of things. There are no new ideas. I really believe that. There are just different stories that need to be told with those ideas.

WB: What struggles have you faced as an artist? We are all struggling, and people who are in entertainment, and art, or any of these industries sometimes want to paint this picture of “I’m doing really well and I’m so successful.” So it’s nice to hear from people who have gotten success in their career, that they also struggle too.

JLD: It goes back to how you define success. I’ve been out of school for 12 or 13 years and this is a long haul. It doesn’t happen over night. You need to put the time in. You need to put the time into your community too because you can’t do it by yourself. You can’t do it by sitting in your studio making work alone. You have to initiate and bridge a relationship with your community because we can only get through this together. I really thought success for me was to be able to sustain my practice. I always knew I was going to have to work a job. I worked every single job from being a manager at Urban Outfitters. And actually when I graduated from grad school and we moved here, I was a $7.15 employee at Urban Outfitters. I had to work my way up to be a manager. I had a masters degree and I was working with 20 year olds. 

WB: That’s always the weird paradox.

JLD: Yea! But I was so thankful to have a job so I could afford my clay. I wish the art world was better. I wish artists were able to sustain themselves without having to work multiple jobs. But I always had a hustle. I knew as long as I had a way to financially sustain myself and afford my materials, and would have an exhibition or be included in a group show, that was good. There were definitely times that I wanted to give up.

WB: What kept you from giving up? What tactics did you use to keep making the work?

JLD: I knew in the back of my head—there’s a story to be told here. That’s really hard. Even when I look back on my CV there is a big gap. Every time I look at it, it reminds me—this was the time I didn’t have anything, nothing was lining up, but I just kept going. I kept applying for things in hopes that someone would see my work and acknowledge it. I think I also want to forget about that time too.

WB: But it sounds like [that gap] also keeps you going and you obviously got through it and kept making your work. 

JLD: Even though maybe my conceptual practice was still trying to find an audience, I think the frustrating part was that I was not included in shows with Chinese or Asian artists because I wasn’t Chinese enough. Then maybe other audiences didn’t fully understand because I wasn’t American enough. Now that has changed so much, which is interesting to now be in that position where this is the most shows I’ve ever been asked to be included in about Asian American experience and identity, which makes me so happy because I know that something has changed. When I had that gap, I also think it was partly timing and luck. I got an exhibition at Blue Star I think it was 2014, I would have to look. I knew it was coming and it was a solo show in the middle gallery and that kind of in some ways was the exhibition that changed my work. I went all in. I plucked my eyebrows off. I’m making blue and white eyebrows. I am using every part of my body. I have these ideas that have been living in my sketchbook that I have wanted to try for a really long time. I unabashedly went into it with tons of fear and no fear. I am so thankful. I had met someone who was on the board when you could submit a proposal through the board to have an exhibition. See this is also something too—I didn’t know how people got shows. 

WB: Yeah there is no path that’s set out for us. There are no text books that are like if you want to be an artist these are the steps you take.

JLD: It was timing and luck.

WB: And preparation.

JLD: Yes! Thank you. I also need to stop saying it’s luck.

WB: No luck is real!

JLD: Luck is real but it’s sometimes devoid of acknowledging hard work also plays a role in it.

WB: My dad always quotes someone, I don’t remember who first said it, “Opportunity is the intersection of preparedness and luck.”

JLD: I like that, yea so true!

WB: I think it was maybe a football coach who said that [laughs] but it resonated with me. He said it to me when I graduated from college and it just stuck with me. 

JLD: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think that exhibition at Blue Star—Dark & Lovely came at that time when I was ready to make all new work and I was throwing everything at it. I knew I was going to have a bigger audience. I had the label of this institution Blue Star Contemporary. It really changed the path of my career and my work. I am so thankful for that opportunity. 

WB: I looked at the photographs from that show and it seemed amazing. I wish I could have been there in person. 

JLD: Thanks!

WB: What advice would you give to other working artists and emerging artists?

JLD: The first thing I tell my students is you need to find your community. You need to interact with other artists. Artists are the most giving in that sense. When we first moved here I met so many artists and then you become folded into a community, but you have to continue to nurture it and put the time in. That’s first and foremost. Especially if you’re nervous about going to an opening and you don’t know anyone, just go up and introduce yourself. That was advice someone gave me—don’t leave an opening without introducing yourself to two people. I am extremely shy but once you start doing it, now when I go to openings I’m like, “Hi! hi! hi! hi!” It gets easier. First you have to find and nurture your community.

Your studio can be your kitchen table. It doesn’t need to be a space you rent. It doesn’t need to be anything. Your kitchen table can be your studio. Plenty of artists have made it without having these things. Don’t let that need or desire for a studio inhibit you from making. 

WB: Such good advice. It can be a corner in your room. I used to let that inhibit me from creating things all the time. 

JLD: That’s the biggest concern I hear from students—not having a space. For a long time my space was a kitchen table in an apartment we rented and it’s only been within the past few years that I have been able to make a space in our garage. 

You have to keep making work. You have to find ways to get it out there. If you make work and it only stays on your kitchen table or in your bedroom and another person never lays eyes on it, you’re doing a giant disservice to yourself. That goes back to nurturing your community and putting yourself out there. 

WB: That is all really good advice. Your students are lucky to have you there. The community is such good advice and not limiting yourself by space. Every single artist I talk to says, “make the work.”

JLD: Which feels the hardest to do when many artists are just struggling to be able to pay their rent and have groceries. I think you have to really want this. I hate that we have systems in place in this world that make it so hard to be a full time artist. 

WB: Well hopefully we can change that road. Thank you so much. This has been so nice to be outside, talk to you and see your space. 

JLD: Thank you!

Photography and Interview by Wendy Bowman Butler | @wendybowmanbutler
Connect with Jennifer Ling Datchuk on Instagram @jenniferlingdatchuk and see more of her work on jenniferlingdatchuk.com

Jennifer Ling Datchuk is represented by Ruiz-Healy Art
201-A East Olmos Drive
San Antonio, TX 78212
210.804.2219
Contact by e-mail here