Iconic Gordon Parks photos show shades of gray in American race relations

By Mark Jenkins

Iconic Gordon Parks photos show shades of gray in American race relations

Many of the show’s diverse impulses come together in Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s three pieces, which combine painting and video. She inserts herself into a Chinese landscape and projects painted fish onto a 3-D pond. In the two-part “Sleep of Reason: Writing on the Wall,” Lee poses like the man in Goya’s famed etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”; she slips into slumber as a poem swirls onto the screen. In one version, she wears traditional clothing, and the text is in Chinese calligraphy; in the other, she’s in Western attire, and the words have been translated into English. It’s an eloquent portrait of someone who lives in one culture but dreams of another.