'Warren King: The King of Carboard'
In a mostly gray New York City art studio, sculptor Warren King cuts out pieces of cardboard from a large sheet using a pair of scissors. The corrugations emit a satisfying rippp sound with each snip.
Behind him are nearly life-sized sculptures of his family members. Their features are exaggerated, jowls or eyebrows taking up half their face; King, in a voice-over, notes that because he doesn’t bend the cardboard against the grain, the “shapes I have are very limited.” Instead, he must “simulate that shape.”
“Since I have this set of rules that I won’t break, that’s what gives my pieces their distinctive, planar geometric look,” King says. He describes the material with the reverence of a woodworker: “I don’t handle the cardboard in an unnatural way. If you look at cardboard, and you look at the material, it has a certain character.”
But he’s candid that cardboard is nothing special: “I started working with cardboard really because it was just around.”
King, who was born in Madison and now lives in New York City, is the subject of a new 15-minute documentary, Warren King: King of Cardboard, directed by Michigan-born filmmaker Curtis Chin. The documentary is part of PBS’ American Masters series, which profiles artists and creators around the country. King’s sculptures have been exhibited across the U.S. and throughout western Europe.
Screening as part of the program "Immigrant Stories: Wisconsin's Own Documentaries" at the Wisconsin Film Fest April 11 at UW-Madison’s Music Hall, the film details King’s childhood in Wisconsin as the son of Chinese immigrants and his path into art. A career shift provides the jumpstart: After King quits his job at his father’s engineering firm, he decides to learn about his family’s history by creating cardboard depictions of relatives and their journeys in China and America.
The decision is met with confusion by some family members, including his mother.
Chin says the documentary came about after PBS, which had shown one of his recent films, approached him saying that they’d have funding for him to create an episode. On a tight deadline, he took to Facebook to crowdsource potential subjects; a mutual friend responded that he should check out King. Taking a look through the sculptures, Chin was “instantly stunned by his work.”
“The more I got into his story, the more I realized that this is someone that I could really connect with,” says Chin, who adds that he was excited to tell a “Midwest story.”
Chin says he needed to figure out how best to depict the cardboard art; one shot takes viewers through an individual corrugation in an eight-second zoom. Chin hired director of photography Martin Awano, whose “regular gig is working for a high-end gallery from Switzerland,” knowing that he would likely be able to film cardboard well.
Chin instructed him to try to “understand cardboard. I want people to see cardboard in a new way.”
His approach to filming documentaries is “getting [the subjects] to trust you enough to open up about their life,” and acknowledges that there’s no directing some scenes. For the climax of the film, when King shows a sculpture he created of his grandmother to his mom for the first time, Chin was content to just let the camera roll.
“He talked about his mom. He talked about wanting to impress her. Obviously showing the work makes sense. But beyond that, you really can't direct anything.”
