Y Gallery is pleased to present “Made in China”, an exhibition of prints by New York artist Paul Dacey. This show, which made it’s debut in Beijing in 2006, consists of digitally enhanced, pop-inspired images of a crumpled plastic shopping bag bearing the ever present “MADE IN CHINA” stamp. These works address production and consumption, power, and confrontation. Dacey manages to make them look luxurious and desirable as they still conserve their physical emptiness.

In “MATERIALS and METALS”, the bag is presented in a series of twenty five richly colored variations and metamorphoses from disposable item into “something of virtual value”. The bag takes on a sheen; it exudes luminescence and becomes a nugget of gold, lime green satin, smooth vinyl, a pool of mercury, molten lava. In “FIRE/ICE”, Dacey’s bag reappears in twelve variations of red and yellow, China’s national colors, and the United States’ red, white, and blue. These colors find themselves woven arterially, as if they were a simultaneous intellectual merging and tangling of the world’s current superpowers. Dacey implies a global warming between the two countries and also refers to the consequences of our technologies. “IN the EYE of the OTHER” offers us the same image as a diptych, two portraits facing one another, upside down from each other, one in China’s colors, one in America’s, conferring or confronting—either way, the “Made in China” within speaks volumes.

The exhibition “Made in China” is particularly relevant now as China finds itself under considerable scrutiny by most of the Western world. Made for this exhibition, “WHEN THE YELLOW RIVER FLOWS CLEAR” uses the yellow river as a subject of commentary, reflecting our current global condition, and contrasting the conflicting cultures at its source.

Paul Dacey has a BFA in Painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art, including studies at the Artists for the Environment Foundation, in the Delaware Water Gap, Lacoste, in Southern France, and a fellowship at Yale University. Dacey has exhibited at the Maxwell Davidson Gallery for over 10 years, in NYC and Art Fairs throughout the country and Europe. His work appears in museum, corporate and private collections; commissioned work in New York, Texas, Canada, England and Africa. Besides additional shows in the U.S., he has shown internationally, notably at the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus, Germany; the Gao Brothers: Beijing New Arts Project, China and currently in “Illuminators”, Yekaterinburg, Russia. He lives and works in New York.