In Practice: Covey Gong
It is no secret that Giacomo Puccinis opera Turandot (1926), the source text behind New York-based sculptor Covey Gongs solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, presents a mythic and embellished vision of dynastic China. The operas narrative, in which a princess who poses riddles to vet suitors is bested at her own game, comes from Haft Peykar, an epic poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. This was reworked into a short story by an eighteenth-century French orientalist and adapted for the stage in Germany in 1801 before making its way into the Italian composer...