Joyce Kozloff: China is Near

For almost 40 years, Joyce Kozloff (born 1942) has lived near New York's Chinatown and fantasized traveling the Silk Route. For this project, Kozloff pasted Chinese tissue paper cutouts into a sketchbook, then copied old maps of the Silk Road onto these pages--some in Chinese, some in English. She then painted into these cartographic collages using the bright colors of contemporary Chinese pop culture, and went to Google Maps to search for "China," which appeared all over the globe: China, New York; China, Indiana; China, Tanzania; China, Mexico, so she downloaded and collaged over these too. Finally she photographed the piles of stuff on Mott Street, Manhattan; Main Street, Flushing, Queens; 8th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Webster Street, Oakland and Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California--all destinations on the twenty-first century global Silk Route.