Audrey Chan

Excerpt:
 

Our tour began at the Little Tokyo/Arts District Station, where Audrey Chan’s 14-panel porcelain enamel and steel mural, “Will Power Allegory,” flanks the tracks on either side of the train platform. The piece — 168 feet long and 14 feet high — presents different vignettes on each panel, populated by real people throughout the decades from city enclaves including Little Tokyo, the Arts District, Skid Row and the former Bronzeville area. Chan conducted three years of community outreach to locate these individuals; some of them are drawn from a Skid Row mural by Danny Park, owner of Skid Row People’s Market. Along the bottom, there’s a continuous procession of Angelenos marching, which binds the panels.

 

Surveying the work, Chan explains that it’s meant to “challenge historical narratives through allegories of power, place and identity.”

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“I’m thinking about the legacy of the WPA and government-funded murals about the American scene,” Chan says. “I’m focusing on the resilience of communities that have been marginalized in so many ways, whether that’s the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe or the Skid Row community, which has faced displacement. Also, honoring the Asian American movement, so generations who are fighting to keep places like Little Tokyo alive.”

 

The work, inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, is intricately layered. It incorporates scans of mulberry bark paper to create a unifying, pulp-like background. Dozens of digital files went into Chan’s design, which a fabricator translated onto porcelain enamel.

 

Suddenly, a train car arrives and the bottom portion of the artwork is obscured; but larger figures at the top of the work seem to rise above the train. This is strategic, Chan says. Sightlines were a challenge in making the piece, which is surrounded by architectural columns and signage, not to mention moving subway cars. But the work is meant to be interactive and experienced in the round.

 

“I’m imagining that people going in either direction on the train are joining that procession,” Chan says. “I wanted there to be different allegorical vignettes that you could go in and out of — and you’re as much a spectator as the one being viewed.”

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