Waves of Influence: Foreign Materialities by Elizabeth Briel

Taipa Village Cultural Association is honoured to invite Elizabeth Briel as the international artist for this year’s art program finale. Her expertise in architecture and heritage aligns seamlessly with our initiatives that integrate contemporary art, architecture, and design in innovative ways. Supported by our organization, her paper installation, “Waves of Influence,” was completed in 2025 and showcased alongside selected works from her earlier series, “Impressions: What Lies Beneath Paris & Hong Kong”—a Greater Bay Area project developed at a paper art center in the Guangzhou region and exhibited in Taipa Village Macau. “Waves of Influence” will feature an art installation crafted from recycled denim and T-shirts, transformed into a flowing wall of Macanese blue and white tiles.

Artist’s Statement

What imageries are used to define a place in transition? What cultural currents lie behind the transmission of ideas that revitalize the arts of an era?

Waves of Influence originated from hours of working on and around my Macanese studio table, inlaid with hand-painted blue and white Chinese porcelain created for the export market, brought by Americans to Hong Kong. I traced the porcelain’s intricate designs, recalling Portuguese cobalt tiles in Macau’s public spaces and the ways this artform linked disparate cultures from China to the west. These blues were the art of empires, which like paper and denim were transported over continents and centuries through migration and trade,  power and conflict, transformed by people at every level of society as they incorporated these objects into their lives. What particularly interested me were cultural transmissions between Chinese empires, Mediterranean caliphates, and Iberian union powers that catalyzed the arts of paper and blue and white porcelain during the past millennium.

In Macau I examined tiles with Portuguese motifs adhered to municipal structures; 20th century azulejos that depicted historic subjects of the South China Sea; and others recently painted tromp l’oeil directly onto stucco walls. As I experimented with ways to translate azulejos into denim paper made from the global « American uniform » of blue jeans (now produced worldwide and worn by billions), I examined tiles’ individual brushstrokes to understand decisions their painters had made. Though cobalt paintings can resemble watercolors, their glazes are often chalkier and more challenging to handle, and it was evident painters had designed workarounds when recreating sketches and other imagery in the tiles. To better understand the hands and minds that had created them, I traveled to Portugal and China to experience the sensations of painting and printing glazes directly from the brush – the touches, scents and sounds of the process, the unforgiving rigor of metal glazes and potential destruction inherent in 1300C° firing.

In the end, a project that grew from fascination with materiality of empires became a way to trace a personal journey from the west to asia and back again – embossing papers with carved wooden trunks from Guangdong used to carry a life over seas, plants as rhetorical devices used to describe immigrants as invasive species, architectural details from life on one continent transposed onto another.

May the transformations continue.

Thank you to: curator João o, Impromptu Projects; supporters — Taipa Village Cultural Association; Carol Kwok, Alexandre Pais and Andre Lui, authors of Azulejos em Macau; Pottery Workshop Jingdezhen, Estudio Lazuli Sintra, Gazete Azulejos Porto and Ceramicas Vicente Lisbon for sharing practical expertise in cobalt tile painting and porcelain/stoneware firing; Triton and Shell Athens for the loan of their 1.5 tonne Hollander beater used to transform denim into paper.

— Elizabeth Briel 

About Elizabeth Briel 

Elizabeth Briel is a painter and printmaker who works primarily with paper as a response to where she lives – printing directly from architecture, making paper from linen and cotton textiles, and creating large-scale modular paper installations. Her work begins with materials imbued with meaning—papers devastated by a typhoon or made of military uniforms, paints of bone and lead. Born in California and raised in Minneapolis (BFA Painting, University of MN) and having lived in New York and Boston before leaving the US in 2003, she lived in  Asia for two decades and in 2024 moved to Paris on a Passport Talent artistic and cultural visa. She has exhibited in Europe, Asia and Australia, and returns to Asia for annual projects.

More about Elizabeth Briel, please visit : www.ebriel.com

Organiser

Sponsor 

Cultural Development Fund

of the Macao SAR

Art Consultant 

Creative Partner