Tang Contemporary Art is delighted to announce the opening of our first exhibition at our Wong Chuk Hang Space in 2024, the international artists group exhibition "The Possible and the Elsewhere," which will be held on January 26, 2024. Curated by Fiona Lu and Huang Ying, the exhibition will present paintings by eight artists: Sophie-Yen Bretez, Demarco Mosby, Yowshien Kuo, Yuan Yuan, Wang Jian, Wei Minghui, Su Hang, and Jaeheon Lee.

 

Yowshien Kuo's artwork integrates the image of Asian Americans into surreal landscapes with a touch of American Western aesthetics. The television signal test pattern at the bottom of the image seems to be evidence of a glitch in the real world. The Asian figures in cowboy attire break free from stereotypes, appearing full-bodied and vibrant, like mythical gods. The diverse media employed transforms the artwork into a sensory stimulus, and everything outside the body is filled with desire: characters surrounded by old television sets, accepting the desires propagated by popular culture; the characters themselves are also filled with desires for certain things, blindly falling in love with ideals, cultures, or their own identities, but in this frenzy, they are actually unable to control the culture they are in.

 

In Sophie-Yen Bretez's paintings, the bare Asian female figures gaze back at the viewers, accompanied by the mysterious blue lobsters. Such autobiographical elements reflect the artist's exploration of personal history and identity. The horizon delineates the invisible boundaries of vast plains, evoking a collective nostalgia that is almost ethereal. The predicament of women and their dispersion returns to the intimate relationship between life and nature, as expressed in the poetic titles. The interplay of warm and cool tones, the harmonious contradictions in color and composition, coexist with the aesthetic beauty of form. While beneath the beauty and harmony, Bretez unveils that the essence is often one of pain, darkness, and sorrow.

 

Demarco Mosby's figures are outlined with loose and rugged brushstrokes, dressed in simple attire, holding a white bird, and trapped in stagnant waters. The clumsy gestures and blurred faces of the individuals in the thickly painted wilderness seem to be immersed in complex emotional confusion, visually metaphorizing primal human experiences and the psychological imagery filled with struggle, futility, and ambiguity. The allegorical narrative paintings provoke reflection on life: where does the true self reside in the repetitive journey of everyday life? Does the accumulation of emotional trauma bring underlying destruction or cultivate resilience?

 

In the absurdity of grey-toned everyday scenes, Wei Minghui's characters often appear trapped in a deadlock, stuck between action and stagnation. Within the awkwardness of the male figures crossing their legs, we find the fatigue discussed by Han Bingzhe, where the diminishing negativity in an achievement-oriented society creates a leisurely space that allows for lingering, providing a prolonged and slow observation. The artist focuses on familiar states and, through the dizziness, discovers that their essence is also an illusion that needs to be confronted.

 

In Su Hang's artwork, the cloud formations and solid rock forms in the surrounding environment of the composition seem to parallel the artist's contemplative processing of figures and subjects. Each character has their own direction of movement, whether on a journey or paying homage to the sun, creating immense tension arising from the conflict between belief and the reality of the situation. The deliberate choice of allegorical themes and stylistic prototypes rationalizes their contemporaneity through the repeated actions of painting, embodying the artist's struggle with issues of consciousness. Together, they form a radical yet restrained, heterogeneous narrative in painting.

 

Yuan Yuan's artwork reflects a greater pursuit of the ontology in oil painting. Yuan Yuan creates a sense of texture creating thick impastos by using a palette knife, and preserves the incidental products that emerge during the process on the canvas permanently. Everyday individuals, through intentional treatment, become entangled in the tension between realism and intense dramatic pulling, revealing glimpses of the external aspects of painting (realism and treatment) and the internal aspects (the spiritual essence of the painted subjects and the artist's own inner state).

 

Wang Jian, on the other hand, abandons more narratives and cleverly combines classical forms with contemporary life scenes, pursuing the artist's subjective expression and a pure visual experience. In the traditional pairing of women and indoor spaces, the sense of confinement and suffocation disappears, leaving behind the everyday ambience. The slender figures of the girls, whether facing away from the viewer or holding books with their faces unseen, exhibit a mysterious and resistant posture, with the individual features of the face hidden, emphasizing the embodiment of the body as a representative state. After deliberately removing the sense of portraiture, the girls present a certain homogeneity and flexibly move in different spaces as symbols.

 

The female figures depicted by Jaeheon Lee are comparatively more ethereal and subtle. Multiple faces and silhouettes overlap, existing boundaries are blurred, much like the features of the women themselves, which are obscured by the artist—body/soul, reality/fantasy, presence/absence, the living/the dead. Could these women be embodiments of Woodman? The space on the canvas is split from reality, and the brushstrokes become fragmented and conflicting traces left by the self. Everything is uncertain, dislocated, and fleeting.

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