Sacramental Artist Creates Art for the Dead

San Francisco, March 3, 2007 - For Steve Yee, his city’s name, Sacramento, evokes new meaning for him and his art. He has been burning most of his work as a sacramental offering to the Chinese that contributed to so much to the Sacramento area. Some of the pieces that remain will be exhibited at the Triangle Gallery in San Francisco. The exhibit will run from March 27 through April 28.

Yee, a Sacramento artist, wants to venerate China Slough, a part of Sacramento which is buried and still hidden since long ago, “The work I do in my art and for my community is directly connected to an ancient Chinese tradition that is expressed in the ritual of altar offerings as a form ancestral veneration.”

Last year, Steve became involved in the sensitive cultural issues that surround Sacramento’s Railyard redevelopment and the Chinatown that was burned and buried beneath the site in 1855. The Chinese called the area Yee Fow. Currently, plans between the city, Southern Pacific, and Thomas Enterprises are well underway to forever change this culturally sensitive historical site. The 240 acres will be the largest infill development in the United States. “The Chinese in Sacramento have serious concerns regarding the preservation of their ancestral land that lies beneath the Railyard.” states Yee.

Burning art may seem strange to some westerners, but in China the burning of representational images is commonplace and goes as far back as the Late Neolithic Period. Buddhist temples usually include a furnace where prayers written upon paper may be burned. The traditional Chinese ritual of “dzidzat” means the burning of paper. The social or nonreligious function of ancestral veneration is to cultivate kinship values like filial piety, family loyalty, and continuity of the family lineage.

In Steve Yee’s altar offerings, the artist pulls characters from the headlines of Chinese news in print and online. These characters are deconstructed onto wood putty boards. Yee uses a unique combination of materials as pigments. To this artist, these materials are potent with meaning; rice, teas, and ashes or gunpowder, rust, bone and ashes or seashells, minerals of Taoist immortal elixirs, gold and ashes. Chinese poetry is written on the surface of his paintings, sometimes in an abstract gestural form. A complex critical engagement with California Chinese history and culture runs through his work. “Steve’s work is very sensitive and subtle. I don’t know of anyone else doing anything like this. Of course, burning them is so unfortunate.” says Jack Van Hiele, Director of the Triangle Gallery for over 40 years.

Robert Hartman, artist and professor of painting at UC Berkeley for 30 years, recently convinced the artist that his original wood paintings needed to be preserved and prints of the artwork would be more fitting to burn as an offering.

The artist is still doing what he can to protect his ancestral land buried underneath the Sacramento Railyards. He is currently working with Thomas Enterprise, the Chinese community, and Sacramento civic leaders. “Sometimes burning incense or making offerings is not enough. Sometimes our ancestors, though they have passed this world, still need our protection. How hollow would we be if we did nothing to care for our elders that suffered so much persecution at Sacramento’s Yee Fow? I see this experience as sacramental, my path has intersected between the sacred and the artistic, of devotion and expression. I am attempting to preserve a moment in a world so temporal. Then again, this is the way of the Tao.” says Yee.