Joyce Kozloff. China is Near

Joyce Kozloff has never been to China, but she has fantasized about traveling the Silk Route for almost forty years.
During that time, China has moved nearer to the West. For this project, Kozloff explored the China accessible to her, visiting the Chinatowns of Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn in New York, and Oakland and San Francisco in California-all destinations on the 21st-century Silk Route. Her photographs convey the sensory overload of these locations, their surfeit of gaudy trinkets, cheap apparel and glittering electronics.
These artifacts have entered Western culture, mingled with our indigenous kitsch, and become dislocated from their origins-the Chinese equivalent to American pop, which has also saturated the globe.
Reveling in the ways this visual clutter rhymed with her layered, dense aesthetic, Kozloff juxtaposed her photographs with collages incorporating drawings of old maps, recent Google searches and traditional Chinese cutouts. The resulting series, China is Near, presents a rich, immersive, unconventional chronicle of China: not a travelogue of a country visited, but of one imaginatively traversed.