Jennifer Ling DatchuK
Half
Publication Released July 2019
Jennifer Ling Datchuk: Half collects works from Datchuk’s three series — Dark and Lovely, Blackwork, and Girl You Can — which build upon themes of identity, race, and gender primarily through porcelain, as well as performance and digital documentation. Featured writers include Sarah Darro and Kalia Brooks Nelson.
As a title, Half leaves a lingering feeling. It relates primarily to Datchuk’s mixed heritage as a Chinese American woman and how she navigates being neither fully one or the other. Datchuk explores the dichotomies associated with he idea of being half in a multitude of ways, beginning with the sculpture by the same title, which writer Darro begins mining immediately in her essay.
In another sense, Half also relates to Datchuk being restricted as a craft artist throughout the start of her career versus consideration as a contemporary artist. As a result, Datchuk is consistently aware of how her work is seen, just as much as how she herself is seen.
Datchuk mines the loaded histories, cross-cultural significance, symbolic dualities, and provenance of her materials. It is her stewardship and scholarship of those material-histories that allows her to bring forth and enact charged objects and agents of critical discourse, camaraderie, and disruption. Half relates the bodily extensions of her Chinese American identity, expressed through threads of human hair, to the globalized politics of both the porcelain trade and the commercial beauty industry...
—Sarah Darro
Excerpt of "Critically Making Self: Jennifer Ling Datchuk"
Datchuk is familiar with living in an identity space of in-between-ness. Although this transient state may be familiar, it is also a site of contestation. As such, her work is charged with critiquing the rigid social and cultural boundaries of race and gender—not only in how the parameters of race and gender are constructed, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how the appearance of race and gender affect physical bodies as a means enacting power over standards of beauty, the division of labor, and the consumption of goods…
—Kalia Brooks Nelson
Excerpt of "Blue and White Forever: Embodying Race and Gender in Clay"
About the Artist
Jennifer Ling Datchuk is an artist born in Warren, Ohio and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is an exploration of her layered identity—as a woman, a Chinese woman, as an “American,” as a third culture kid.
Trained in ceramics, Datchuk works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work, such as textiles and hair, to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and personal history. Her practice evolved from sculpture to mixed media as she began to focus on domestic objects and the feminine sphere. Handwork and hair both became totems of the small rituals that fix, smooth over, and ground women’s lives. Through these materials, she explores how Western beauty standards influenced the East, how the non-white body is commodified and sold, and how women’s—globally, girls’—work is still a major economic driver whose workers still struggle for equality.
Datchuk holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She has received grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, travel grant from Artpace, and the Linda Lighton International Artist Exchange Program to research the global migrations of porcelain and blue and white pattern decoration. She was awarded a residency through the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum to conduct her studio practice at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, and has participated in residencies at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Vermont Studio Center, European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, and the Arts/Industry Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Kohler Company in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. In 2017, she received the Emerging Voices award from the American Craft Council and in 2020 was named a United States Artist Fellow in Craft.
She is an Assistant Professor of Art in the Ceramics Department at Arizona State Univeristy in Tempe, Arizona, and lives and maintains a studio practice in Phoenix, Arizona.
