A smiling East Asian woman with shoulder-length hair stands in front of a blue, white and brown patterned wallpaper.

Beatrice Glow

San Jose, California

Beatrice Glow received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. Beatrice Glow is a New York and Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist working in service of public history and just futures. Stemming from drawing and painting, her practice includes sculptural installations, olfactory experiences, emerging media, performances, and artist books. An American of Taiwanese heritage, she interrogates the visual languages of luxury, power and aromatic cultural histories through Asian diasporic and anti-colonial perspectives. Often working in allyship with Indigenous culture bearers and co-laboring with researchers, her projects on the exploitation of botanical life reveals the contemporary ramifications of colonialism, capitalism, and inequitable trade networks. Recent solo shows include The Collection of the EoS 10^15, Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation, San Francisco, CA (2023); Once the Smoke Clears, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2022), Forts and Flowers, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taiwan (2019); Spice Routes/Roots, Duke House, New York University Institute of Fine Arts, NY (2017); and Aromérica Parfumeur, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile (2016). Currently the Artist-in-Residence at New-York Historical Society, her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Culpeper Art and Culture Program, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Yale-NUS College Artist-in-Residence Programme, Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Smack Mellon Studio Program; ZERO1: Art and Technology Network, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Hemispheric Institute, and the Fulbright Scholar Program.


Events

Gilt/Guilt


Beatrice Glow is a multidisciplinary artist working from anti-colonial and Asian diasporic lens in service of public history and just futures.

Artist Bio

Gilt/Guilt is a speculative performance-installation with sculpture, scent and video elements imagining a late-21st century auction preview of the collection of the dynastic EoS 10^15 (Empire of Smoke quadrillionaire) family. Preparing to relocate into a luxury bunker, the family contracts an auction house to help them downsize. The installation is animated by performance-tours led by The Auctioneer character who addresses the audience as esteemed collectors. Participants travel through a multi-storied building that is transformed into a haunting cabinet of curiosity housing 100+ seemingly luxurious artifacts, many of which are created from a process of virtual reality sculpting, 3D printed in resin, metal and bioplastics, hand-crafted and painted to mimic the surfaces of porcelain, precious metals, and rare wood. Each object –rare scent bottles, ivory rifles, commemorative gunpowder horns, silk garments, bejeweled masks, and video documentation of estates– unveils how the quadrillionaires accrued intergenerational wealth through centuries of investing in spice and tobacco plantations and arms industries. The unparalleled opulence blurs fact and fiction to interrogate how the language of, and desire for, luxury and power eclipse painful realities of Indigenous dispossession, enslavement, forced migrations, and environmental harm in the name of Euro-American “progress.” An accompanying mock auction catalogue details these stories in a restrained, diplomatic tone. As the immersive experience winds down, The Auctioneer transitions into a facilitator supporting participants to reflect on ways to grapple with unresolved historical wounds that continue to shape our present, and in the process, subtly, yet powerfully, conscientise the audience.

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Award Year
2024
Status

In Progress