Nick Geankoplis: Preserving Complexity Glen R. Brown

Appears in the April 2022 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Nicholas Geankoplis characterizes his recent works as “narrators you look to for all the answers but who sometimes lead you in the wrong direction.” This effect, largely a consequence of appropriated imagery, montage compositions, and subtle, sometimes even esoteric allusions to history and culture, is of a timely relevance. Contemporary art that confronts the viewer with ambiguity, intricacy, and irresolution provides more than a diversion from the cynical reductionism now so pervasive in American sociopolitical discourse. It forms a critical haven for the rational powers of the mind. Just as the Islamic world preserved the mathematics and philosophy of classical antiquity while Europe languished beneath the dogma of the Dark Ages, contemporary art that acknowledges reality as infinitely complex, and therefore evasive of facile partisan thinking, can claim a place among a constellation of sanctuaries for the intellectual good faith that is now so often absent from much of the American public sphere. 

A Complex Relationship

Geankoplis’ two current series—Tea & Coffee, characterized by collage-like fields of decals, and Saccharin, in which these fields spread fluidly over thick drips of glaze—are about China, the US (and the broader Western world), and the complex relationship of cultural and economic exchange between them. While xenophobia, racist rants, and jingoistic rhetoric about China have become disgracefully common in American populist politics, Geankoplis does not answer these overtly. Rather, he renders the grotesqueness of their absolutism more obvious by contrast, alluding to the Sino-American relationship in layered complexity, tenuous and fluid, that never hardens into the kind of idées fixes that can breed animosity. If his titles allude to controversies, the works present not binary oppositions but rather mesh-like intertextualities, and not simply because they issue from years of experiences as an American artist living and teaching in Beijing. His works bring to mind the words of James Rosenquist, whose Pop Art magnum opus, F-111—itself a complex layering of images over a point of controversy—expressed the realization that to adopt a position on sociopolitical issues in the modern world was like “taking a stand on a conveyor belt.” Geankoplis’ images present a similar self-consciousness about judgment in the face of flux. 

Now a professor of ceramics at Kansas State University, Geankoplis began a four-year appointment as a visiting international professor of ceramic design for industry at the China Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) immediately after receiving his MFA from Alfred University in 2013. In Jingdezhen, a city renowned for its millennium-old porcelain industry, he produced a series of what he describes as “gestures”—installations, environments, and performances in abandoned spaces. “These were factories that were part of the imperial kilns complex a long time ago,” he explains, “There was still evidence of ceramic production: molds and kilns, kiln parts, and even remnant decals on the floors. They felt like spaces ripe for intervention.” 

Abandoned factories, once-bustling sites of manufacture reduced to stillness, invoke the pathos of obsolescence even more keenly than any of their worn-out or outmoded products. Productivity is life, and to see it extinguished invokes a more abject form of stasis. In this case, the melancholy of dissolution suggested to Geankoplis a string of associations relating to the history of global ceramics commerce. The yawning silence of the vacant Jingdezhen factories, after all, has wistful counterparts in numerous Western sites of pottery and porcelain manufacture now rendered obsolete by competition and offshore manufacturing. Cheap Chinese labor has been the operative factor. At the same time, it is well to remember that porcelain wares were invented at Jingdezhen, which lost its monopoly on those luxury goods through competition from the Arita kilns of Japan and the European factories of Meissen, Sèvres, Bow, and Chelsea. Even the popular transferware pottery of Wedgwood and Spode undercut the market for Chinese blue-and-white ceramics. 

4 Pillars and Pedestals (alternate view), unfired porcelain, traditional ware boards, site-specific installation, photo documentation, 2016.

Found-Object Projects

Geankoplis’ response to the flooding of thought experienced in the vacant-factory spaces took the form of found-object projects such as Fired Forms in Absentia, three columns of stacked vessel molds, and Pillars & Pedestals, in which old wooden ware boards supporting unfired clay bowls were exposed to the elements atop pillars that no longer supported factory roofs. More important for his current work, however, were the first pieces in his Tea & Coffee series: porcelain vessels over which vintage decals spread like layers of accumulated detritus. In the more recent works, the porcelain elements are tiles, the smallest 24 × 24 inches and the largest 24 × 48 inches. Made by artisans, often in small family enterprises, these Jingdezhen tiles are perfectly smooth and uniform, belying the fact that they are rolled out by hand with metal pipes or wooden dowels, even when the dimensions are 8 feet or more. “They’re made exclusively for decorative painting,” Geankoplis relates. “The paintings are usually framed, often garishly. I’m adopting the immediate visual language of that, but my imagery is very different. Also, using decals as opposed to hand painting isn’t something that one would do in China. There’s a big separation between what’s painted by hand and what’s done by machine.”

In China, painting on tiles can be traced back at least as far as the Han Dynasty, but the tradition of mounting examples in gaudy picture frames brings to mind the industry for inexpensive souvenir paintings that thrived in Macau and Canton (Guangzhou) during the China trade of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Initially produced by Westerners, these landscapes and genre scenes were soon mass-produced by Chinese entrepreneurs. Geankoplis’ compositions might at first glance seem to share little with these cultural hybrids, apart from the fact that Chinese manufactured tiles are enclosed in Western-style frames. The merging of cultural signifiers is, however, more extensive in the compositions. “One of the guiding formal layouts is traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting with blocks of text,” Geankoplis reveals. “The decals almost form mountainscapes or cloud scenes. I’m also thinking of the sorts of vignettes where there are people toiling in their daily tasks. I’m trying to keep within those basic parameters, almost as an aroma to the work. As it gets too dense, I pull images away.” 

The images themselves are a blend of Asian and Western-style representations, all applied as decals that scream of mass production: hobby-craft types available in the US and industrial tableware versions sourced from China. “That’s one reason for the tension between the images,” Geankoplis observes. “The decals, particularly some of the kitsch ones, are part of a European ceramic tradition, but have been reprinted. They ultimately reflect heavy historical influence from Chinese ceramics. Now, that’s all being borrowed back on contemporary Chinese tableware. In my compositions, there are Chinese decals with Delft-replica examples or Currier and Ives scenes. To me it’s deeply interesting when they’re matched together in this canvas format, which already feels a little strange for ceramics. Also, a lot of the decals will have the name of the factory that made them printed below. As another nod to factory production, I add that part to the lower right-hand corner where a painter’s signature would often be.”

Decals and Painting

The tension between hand painting and industrial decals, a subtheme in the Tea & Coffee series, surfaces like a breaching whale in the Saccharine works, in which thick sheets of dripping glaze half smother blank white Jingdezhen tiles. In the modernist tradition of painting, obtrusive, ostensibly spontaneous drips became signifiers of an energetic outpouring of psychical content, most notably in the work of the American Abstract Expressionist painters. Geankoplis, however, painstakingly orchestrates the drips, in the process rendering them vaguely equivalent to the decals covering them—that is, the drips are units of meaning dispassionately produced with an eye to signification and consumption. “What I’m asking the glaze to do, it simply doesn’t want to do,” Geankoplis observes. “And the colors fall into the palette of children’s plastic. They’re bright, saturated colors, like popular culture, but there’s something of a luster reveal. When the glaze crawls or peels away, there’s a golden underbelly.” That underbelly, the thin luster layer between Western drips and Chinese tile, is a subtle counterpart to the superficial montage of stylistically diverse and often nationalistic decal images that ride the glaze like flotsam on a wave.

Tempting as it might be to read into this golden detail a common humanity glimmering from beneath the cultural differences and economic competition separating China and the US—a reading that would append, both aptly and inappropriately, a saccharine moral to the narrative-resistant tiles—Geankoplis’ aversion to clear-cut meaning remains consistent. Economic competition is not a race for cultural triumph. Gold leaf in Buddhist art, as in altarpieces of the early Italian Renaissance, may imply transcendence, the higher order of spirituality, but gold-colored surfaces are also now ubiquitous marks of the material banality of mass production. Toys, trophies, and even tableware in gold plastic epitomize kitsch. Characteristically, Geankoplis does not choose between these polarities, any more than he favors China or the US in a global competition to which the gold luster ascribes an implicitly ambiguous value. “Is it that spirituality or just plastic-ness?” he asks. “It’s unresolved. Now, so much is a matter of cheapness. It’s culture glitter bombed.”

the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.