Portfolio: Ethan Chan

Ethan Chan has convinced me that there might be nothing more American than a sauce packet. Each little rectangle of hermetically-sealed condiment contains within it the triumphs of American ingenuity—engineering, food science, mass production, and global branding dominance—as well as the darker facets of capitalism in all their high fructose corn syrup-soaked nefariousness. Among them are the inequitable and exploitative labor practices in both manufacturing and the fast-food industry, and the environmental consequences that result from our reliance on single-use products. Since 2020, Chan has used sauce packets and cellophane tape to produce Packet Jackets, a series of wearable sculpture that is campy, entertaining, and totally absurd while also offering a pointed critique of the American hero as a social construction.

Left: *State Trooper*, 2021, sauce packets, cellophane tape and hanger, 68 x 52 x 5 in. Right: *Yankee*, 2021, sauce packets, cellophane tape and hanger, 68 x 38 x 3 in.
[Image descriptions: Left: A brown state trooper's uniform with long sleeves and pants hangs on a wooden hanger. The garment is made entirely of fast-food sauce packets. There is a yellow star-shaped badge on the right front pocket, two green arm patches on each sleeve of the jacket, and a black belt with holster and yellow buckle. Right: A short-sleeved New York Yankees baseball uniform hangs from a wire hanger. The garment, made entirely out of sauce packets, is silver with bright blue accents on the sleeves, a bright blue belt, and socks. The words "New York" are written across the front of the shirt.]

Chan was born and raised in Kenosha, WI, but spent large portions of each school year visiting his father, who worked abroad in various countries across Asia. Some years it was Japan, or Thailand, others it was the Philippines. In high school Chan petitioned his parents to stay in the U.S., and he moved with his mother and sister to be near family in suburban Los Angeles. Chan is a lover of both mid-twentieth-century Americana and what he calls “plastic culture,” the kinds of quick, cheap, disposable lifestyle trappings, environments, and industries so often associated with Los Angeles. These interests, filtered through his particular American experience, first found expression in the Packet Jackets, which Chan began as a college student at Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU) in San Diego.

During his senior year at PLNU, Chan decided to repurpose his household’s sauce packet surplus into artwork, which resulted in the first Packet Jacket, Santa Suit (2020), a complete Santa Claus costume tailored to fit Chan’s body. Santa Suit is draped on a wooden hanger, stiff, quilted and glistening, registering somewhere between garment and cartoon. Among the identifiable packets that make up the costume are various brands of ketchup, Kikoman soy sauce, hot sauce packets including Diablo and Cholula, and French’s mustard.

While the Packet Jackets self-consciously revel in their own ridiculousness, they also engage in a multilevel critique. As he has in other bodies of work, Chan points obliquely to the actual costs of cheap thrills. The single-serving products that so many of us hoard simply because they are “free” contribute to the long-lasting detrimental effects of plastics on our health and the environment. This is true of another central feature of the fast-food experience for most children, Happy Meal toys, which have long intrigued Chan as coveted purveyors of temporary happiness that will themselves long outlast humans on this planet. Chan recalled that during family visits to the Philippines, he would see the toys “lying around, in between couch cushions, underneath the bed… and I liked that these Happy Meal toys—which is what everybody wanted—all those little toys that are cheaply made and sourced from China, their function is to bring like 10-15 minutes of happiness. And then they are destined to end up in a corner collecting dust.” In the Filipino context, the entire fast-food experience carried a different kind of meaning for Chan. “McDonald’s was such a big thing at the time, at least for my family,” Chan told me. “It would always be homemade food, traditional Filipino dishes, and then for a celebration it would be, ‘Let’s go to McDonald’s. Let’s go get an American hamburger.’ The culture shock of it being treated like a delicacy really stuck with me.” Chan’s sensitivity to these value-shifts across the cultures in which he’s lived is what gives his work its range—its legibility as both a playful gesture and an uncomfortable truth.

It is tempting to read a promise of egalitarianism in the Packet Jackets, something reminiscent of Warhol’s famous observation that, “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.” And while Chan’s Packet Jackets do deal in similar notions of kitsch banality and economic accessibility, they introduce important challenges to any homogenizing narrative. By using sauce packets in his reconstruction of such American icons as Buzz Aldrin and Elvis, or heroic tropes like the cowboy or baseball player, Chan elucidates the links between capitalist consumption and a particular cultural identity, throwing into relief the underlying assumption of that identity’s whiteness.

*Fighting the Loneliness (of Social Displacement)*, 2021, performance. Photo: Lile Kvantaliani.
[Image description: A young man with tan skin, shoulder-length black hair, and glasses stands on a cliff with the ocean and blue sky behind him. He wears a white astronaut suit with red, blue, yellow, and silver details. Though it resembles a garment, the suit is made of fast-food sauce packets.]

Like many people who identify with multiple cultures, Chan experiences a kind of identity reassignment as he moves through the world. During his extended stays abroad, he was branded as “the American”—placed in what he called the “foreigners” class with the other English-speaking students. “There was the Indian kid, the Korean kid, and I was the American kid because I was born and raised here and I only spoke English, even though I am mostly Chinese,” he said. When he returned to the U.S., those same markers of Americanness were often ignored. Despite his Midwestern upbringing and only speaking English, Chan says, here he was “labeled the Chinese kid again because I’m not white.” Chan takes direct aim at this inequity when he activates the wearable sculptures through performance, as in Fighting the Loneliness (of Social Displacement) (2021). For this work, Chan staged vague and generically cinematic scenes in which he was the star, wearing various Packet Jackets, including Buzz Aldrin, Spidey-Suit, and Yankee (all 2021). The question posed by the work, as Chan describes it, is: “What looks more fake: the questionably staged scene, or a person of Asian descent in the costume of an American Hero?” With this inquiry, Chan exposes the slipperiness of “Americanness,” reminding us how it is reassessed and reassigned across different bodies and different contexts.

—Jordan Karney Chaim, Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego

Notes:

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (United Kingdom: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 100-101.
“Fighting the Loneliness (of Social Displacement),” Artist’s website, accessed September 30, 2022. https://ethanchan.org/Fighting-the-Loneliness

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