Foon Sham at Project 4: (Phone) Book Smart
The Washington Post, 5 June 2009, C2
By Jessica Dawson

Artist Foon Sham works so subtly that we strain to detect even his most radical modifications. The Nothern Virginia-based sculptor adheres to a narrow vocabulary of form, turning out objects that rework the urn, the totem, the helix and other, mostly natural forms.

Until now, Sham's go-to material has been wood - chips and tiles of it, some prefabricated, others with their bark still attached - that he stacks to form his structures. Sham still embraces his hardwoods, but a new material has entered the lexicon.

Though his 12 works on view at Project 4 replicate familiar forms - towers and totems and stacked wall pieces - fully half employ a radical new building block: the phone book.

That's right. Sham cut old copies of Yellow Pages and White Pages into neat little bricks that he embedded alongside his manicured woods. The blocks - sliced to form a grain that variously mimics the blond and yellow natural woods around them - nearly disappear in Sham's sculptures. There's a cube on the gallery's bottom floor that can't possibly be made of anything but wood, yet... the longer we look, the more slices of phone book appear.

Camouflaged alongside the variously textured hardwoods, the directories are all the more subversive for lurking in plain sight.

But what are phone books to us now? Dinosaurs, mostly. If we own one, it's vestigial - probably acquired the last time we moved, and that was perhaps years ago. These days, we find our plumbers online and our friends on Facebook. Artifacts of the landline age, these bulky paper volumes eat up our shelf space.

And yet they remain, to most of us, familiar. In Sham's hands, the books are objectified, rendered useless and strange. All those names and numbers and identifying facts transform into meaningless text on anonymous building blocks.

But Sham finds humor here, too. One massive work - a monumental sculpture that reaches up into the gallery's double-height space - suggests a slender tree. Its "trunk" is made of wood chips but, at its very top, the artist inserted phone-book chunks. It's as if the three sprouted those machine-made materials: recycling and reuse in humorous reversal.

Sham asks us to think about the relationship of paper to its natural source. We consider how those pages have been flattened, processed and tamed. When inserted alongside stuff that Sham gets in the forest, the materials start a conversation about refinement and acculturation.

This is Sham's first U.S. exhibition to employ the new conceit. The idea grew from a 2006 installation at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Sham aimed to include the names of every city resident in that work. Called "House of Identity," the piece was a ziggurat-like structure made from wood and Hong Kong phone directories.

Upon recognizing that not every citizen had been included in municipal phone books, Sham invited viewers to write their personal information - names, phone numbers, license numbers - on rice paper scrolls that they inserted into the house's interior walls. It was Sham's hope that each participant's addition would make up for those excluded from official accounts. (Presumably, identity theft wasn't a concern.) In Hong Kong, the phone books stood for lives lived, however anonymous the books' accountings.

In Washington, the phone-book pieces stand alongside six all-wood works, most a few years old. They're poetic forms. On the gallery's second floor, a trumpet-shaped figure stands upright; the fissure running down one side suggests a stop-motion earthquake or vaginal anatomy. Elsewhere, Sham arranges wood chips in circles and spirals, like serpants biting their tails. On the gallery's first floor, two rounded forms embrace each other like Siamese twins.

The all-wood works have drawn comparisons to Martin Puryear, the American artist with an obsession for wood-turning. Sham's additive, layering approach also brings Andy Goldsworthy to mind. (Unlike Goldsworthy, though, Sham engineers a complex web of fastens - glue and screws and metal support poles - hidden inside his pieces.)

But now that Sham is playing with new materials, perhaps his vision will defy comparison. The books are the right step forward. With luck, they'll nudge his career toward more conceptually complex paths.