Irene June: Don't See the Coffin, Never Cries...

URBANO is pleased to open our fall season with a new work by Irene June: Don't See The Coffin, Never Cries...

A sacrum form with the skin of a Chinese funerary vessel begins to crawl out of a partially-buried coffin. Its guts spill out in tangles of found fibers. From the sacrum extends a spine of braided plastic, at the end of which an eye cries a Heavenly River of grocery string. On its back, a proverb in June’s stepfather’s “broken” English warns them of their stubborn-ness- “don’t see the coffin, never cries” or rather, “you won’t cry until you see the coffin”. 不見棺材，不流淚 (bú jiàn guan caí, bù lǐu leì). Here, the “broken” English is used as a visual signifier of the distance between the artist’s mother language and themselves. This work is a self-portrait identifying with such distance, being scolded, seeing the coffin, and crying.

Born in Portland, Oregon (b.1996), Irene June Chau uses sculpture and performance to invite the audience to engage in a personal narrative of diasporic reconciliation and healing. Their current work explores the spine as a grounding site for unwavering self worship, using Wu Cheng’en’s Monkey King as a conduit for autobiographical storytelling. Through a material-research based practice, each sculpture and performance becomes a self-portrait of transgender and Taiwanese-American spiritual survival. June currently teaches as Adjunct Faculty at Tarrant County College in Hurst, TX. They are a 2024 MFA graduate in Sculpture at UT Austin and a recipient of the CoFA Academic Excellence Continuing Fellowship Award in 2023. They have completed the Caldera AiR Program in OR, TRANSformation Residency in Eugene, OR, and Centrum Emerging AiR in Port Townshend, WA, and internationally at the “Ni de aquí, ni de allá” Cobertizo Artist Residency in Jilotepec, Mexico. They have been featured in The Texas Daily, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Oregon Quarterly, and have exhibited in solo and group shows across the Pacific Northwest, North/Central Texas, and most recently in Jilotepec, Mexico.