Back after 20 years. Meaningful and symbolic.

I speak dialects now: ol’ country, bodega, and rabelaisian. 

I grew up a couple of blocks away from this artery area. Right by the freeway, on Airport Way, in this industrial port city. Stockton is where one rests their collective tools for this long, overseas journey ahead.

They are ingredients for liberation. Helping artists to create here. Skills to build for movement makers. To print and publish soul-reachers. Access to tools, creating networks of collaboration, with valuable data. 

The Suminagashi Workshops held here in this artery area extended on the geology of Stockton’s wind aeolian processes. Co-instructed and built in March of 2024 with Tiffany Pech, HATCH Residency Coordinator, we combined our organizing efforts, and visual arts background to run two workshops for a large collaborative printing session in my hometown of South-side Stockton CA.

Rocks placed in the water vat, originally built for housing tiles, lined with plastic—created currents, toned with a slab of copper. Stone wash and sun erased minerals were used as natural weights for drying the hand-pulled washi prints. 

Surface slip-streams seemed to bend the Black African soap and Southeast Asian lime water as the aqueous effect gave way to a peculiar efflorescence. Each ‘streaking’ of ink on the surface foregrounds the vellum-like water bath. Hand-crafted brushes from our hair shaped symbolic ritual, attaching itself to a broken branch from a recently chopped Oak tree. 

Bound by copper wire, gradients formed readily, and deadly in collective formation. Each student responsible for the emotional content their marbling would have on this floor culture workshop. 

The ensemble of students served their ways of bending water, ink, and wind as artery lines, key drops, and compass points—casting carbon and sublimations onto water. Sinuously delicate, with an all-over glow. Marking the critical, cellular citations of stone, metal, and water. 

I liken Suminagashi to pin-pricking the baptismal surf of cosmic chaos. I joke that I’m a double fantasy aquarium landscaper. The recognition of media fatigue, and technology through surface treatment all retreat as one’s eyes readjust to what is exactly in front of them. For me, it’s the tensioning of vision within the field of chiasma. One becomes the slip-stream in this impermanent transparency.

Students got to see how building layers of color, ink, and gesture encoded quick feedback. They arranged for certain relationships to take place, with interpenetration of the paper by listening, and reading with their hands.

The act of raking downwards, the last step, was key to what could be. Using a tautly pulled piece of paper, we downsampled the ink design to a sharpened reductive graphic, as the raking reduced the coverage, and the multi-colored inks converged in new and unexpected ways on the surface of the water.

Small square pieces of multicolored origami paper were used for its last baptismal surf. Each hand-pulled print was unique, collecting as much of the frayed ink.

Prints were then dried on stackable, formerly baker’s trays that stood together with wheels, allowing for proper airflow, and mobility from outside terrain to inside storage. The resulting, finished stack recalls digital pixels, and like gleeful chefs piping hot biscuits from the oven, we broke bread with some excellent art. 

Passing the test.

Special shout-out to Jacqueline Bahnsen, ceramics specialist, for helping to organize the administration of the workshop, as well as assistance with documentation on printing day. Elazar Abraham, executive director of HATCH Workshop, for the opportunity to build here, alongside his last minute strategy for drying prints. It came together seamlessly, as it all were, in the nick of time.

Tiffany Pech, for coordinating this residency, large scale collaborative printmaking for our build-out, and archiving of this wonderful program. We did that~!

I’m tuned in. Looking forward to coming back. 

Linda Zeb Hang
Stockton CA
2023-24 HATCH Workshop Artist-in-Residence 

🧞‍♀️WORKSHOP: Suminagashi with Linda Zeb Hang (@linda_zeb_hang_studio), Artist in Residence at HATCH Workshop, and Co-instructed by Tiffany Pech (@somethinghere), HATCH (@hatch.workshop) Artist Residency Coordinator.

Learn the basics of Suminagashi, or the art of Japanese water marbling, which in this workshop is a large-scale collaborative printmaking process.

⏳WHEN: Sunday, 24 March 2024, 10:00am–1:00pm
📍WHERE: HATCH (@hatch.workshop), helping artists to create here, 40 S Union St, Stockton CA
❓HOW: $50, Ages 18+. More information and link to register in bio.

🕯️ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Students will be guided through the steps to prepare paper with mordant, using brushes to create an ink design on water with accordian wind fans to manipulate the design, then transfer the design onto paper by hand pulling each unique print. Students will be using 6 colors of inks to create the design in a 38 inch water vat and make up to 4 small prints and 4 medium sized prints. Students will also make their own matte board portfolio folders to take their work home in.

🥣 HOSPITALITY
Collective snacking from 11:30–11:45 am. Fresh fruits, trail mix and tea are included in the enrollment fee.

🎒INSTRUCTORS’ NOTES
Come dressed in your most comfortable clothing: sneakers, flexible clothes and a positive mental attitude.

#collectivesuminagashi #hatchworkshop #lindazebhang #tiffanypech #suminagashi

💎 TRAINING: The Diamond Mind II by Linda Zeb Hang
In this dance training, participants will use a one-minute film of their own movement as material for a booklet.

🕰️ WHEN: Wednesday–Friday, 10–12 May 2023, 12:00–18:00 hrs
📍 WHERE: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Pauwstraat 13a, Utrecht
❓ HOW: More information and link to register in bio.

💎 ABOUT THE TRAINING
In this dance training, the people will use a one-minute film of their own movement as material for a booklet—a sixteen page signature—that distributes their presence, their gesture, as an act of EQ. 

Distribution EQ is experienced through resourceful memory: the embodiment of affective power, a specific emotional architecture whose warbling nest is revealed through session and the slip-stream. The psycho-aesthetic signature is cultivated by impermanent transparencies: the moving form in film, and the resulting printed matter of collage. Yielding pathologies both physical and psychic.

🥣 HOSPITALITY
Collective vegan lunch from 12:00–13:00 hrs. Meal included in the enrollment fee. The abundance and variety of the menu depends on the luck of the b.ASIC a.CTIVIST k.ITCHEN’s dumpster dive.

🎒TRAINER'S NOTES
Come dressed in your most comfortable clothing: sneakers, flexible clothes, and a positive mental attitude.

🎙️Join us on Saturday the 1st of April from 14.00 to 22.00 for RRRadiossage, an extended session of the Reading Rhythms Club. RRRadiossage will function as the opening of the exhibition and public program Ultradependent Public School at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

🎒Ultradependent Public School (UPS) is the public negotiation of a curriculum to learn what we really, really need to enact the worlds we really, really want. Emphasizing study as a radically collective, public labor that lives in-between institutionalized hierarchies, UPS inhabits the edges between formal classrooms and everyday life.

📖 RRRadiossage is an eight-hour hybrid radio broadcast. The program will begin with a collective reading, translation, and annotation of the Manifesto for Ultratranslation by language justice collective Antena. You can find the link to sign up in our bio. We will continue with a walk-and-talk through of the exhibition, featuring the voices of UPS collaborators in thought and practice. Expect contributions by Sami Hammana, Harriet Rose Morley, Jeanine van Berkel, Czar Kristoff, and Linda Zeb Hang. The program will go on with a welcoming conversation by Clara Balaguer, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Femke Snelting, and, of course, culminate with a party kindly brewed by Chananja and DJ Wiel Bullekes.

🔈Tune into our sonic classroom from your living room via Stranded FM or lumbung Radio, or drop by BAK at any time to join into this discursive dance and share some drinks with us.

🕰️ Schedule

Bibliography Diving
14.00–16.00 hrs
Registration required, link in bio!

Sonic Tours and Conversations
16.00–19.00 hrs
Drop by anytime.

A Welcoming Conversation
19:00–20:00 hrs
Official-ish address.

DJ sets
20.00–22.00 hrs
Just a party.

🧞‍♀️WORKSHOP: The Lantern Mark with Linda Zeb Hang (@linda_zeb_hang_studio)
In this sculpture workshop, the people design and build a unique lantern using mat boards and translucent materials.

⏳WHEN: Saturday, 28 Jan 2023, 1:00pm–4:00pm
📍WHERE: KALA (@kalaartinstitute), Berkeley CA
❓HOW: More information and link to register in bio.

🕯️ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Students gain experience using various book arts / printmaking tools and techniques to scavenge, shape and assemble materials into structural story-cloths, braiding foresight with image and text.

The lantern can be thought of as a site-intelligent landmark, gathering people and receiving information. There is an emphasis on pattern exploration, adventures in symmetrical reversal textures, and divining the distance between the real and ideal.

🥣 HOSPITALITY
Collective Lunar New Year snacking from 1:00pm–4:00 pm. Fresh fruits, sweet delicacies and tea are included in the enrollment fee.

🎒INSTRUCTORS’ NOTES
Come dressed in your most comfortable clothing: sneakers, flexible clothes and a positive mental attitude.