New York, NY
“Dimly at first” comes from a chapter titled “Elitere”, a non-word possibly derived from “literature”, “la terre”, or “elle itère”, meaning “she repeats” in French. The prose and poems in this chapter reflect the unsteady, fitful reality of speaking aloud an unfamiliar language. “Dimly”, she writes, “dimly at first / then increase a little more / volume then a little more / take it take it no further / shut it / off.” Cha’s broken syntax is an imperative yet daunting endeavor to speak, to express, to have agency, and ultimately, to belong. The voice may be dim, but it is only at first. It is always seeking to grow, to fill spaces, to have resonance. Like Cha, the artists in the exhibition are female and belong to the Asian diaspora. Though of a younger generation, they too must navigate daily the murky waters of self, identity, and belonging in their adopted, often-troubled home of America. Through visual languages as diverse as their literary counterparts in Cha’s Dictée, thewomen in this exhibition unravel personal histories and challenge predominant narratives with strength and grace. Their voices are vulnerable but not timid, fragile but not weak, dim but only at first.
Brooklyn-based artist Jia Sung presents an excerpt of three works on paper from her series Chaos, Whims, Lust, which was exhibited at the Knockdown Center in the fall of 2019. Drawing from the classical Chinese tale Journey to the West, Sung imbues the male trickster figure of the Monkey King with a subversive, feminine energy. The canonized tale of masculine adventure is reimagined as a narrative of self-discovery, womanhood, resistance, and love. The Monkey “Queen” is Sung’s alter-ego – she poses uniformed for a schoolgirl picture, examines the intricacies of her female body, and sometimes, when the rabbit moon is particularly bright, feels trapped under a tall, tall mountain.
New York-based sculptor Miwa Neishi crafts elegant, textured ceramic vases inspired by the Japanese hiragana alphabet, which was developed in the 5th century from ancient Chinese calligraphy. Hiragana’s simplicity was intended for use by women, whose lack of access to education prevented them from writing kanji, the script primarily used by men. Meditative in nature, organic in shape, and quietly, irresistibly beautiful, Neishi’s hand-formed vessels displace this historical imbalance, imbuing the hiragana alphabet with a sense of strength and agency.
Multimedia artist Rosa Chang immigrated from Seoul at a young age. Her lush, dreamlike canvases depict fragmentary memories of her childhood – nostalgic recollections awash with an undercurrent of tension. In Seoul Soup, she and her sister mimic reeds in a pond, their surreally elongated limbs stretching downward like roots searching for soil.
For Yiting Zhao, quiet interiors and landscapes reflect complex psychologies. The miniature scale of her canvases instills each with a sense of secrecy and suggestion. Zhao often paints in low light, both inside her studio and outside at dusk, a practice most evidently reflected in her Nocturnes. Chinatown Delivery Man is the only work in the series to feature a figure. Cropped at an almost uncomfortable angle, the man’s identity is obscured. Despite his anonymity, however, he is recognizable and familiar, a mainstay of Chinatown that we acknowledge warmly.
For other artists, conceptualizing identity and reconciling with multiplicity are aims best pursued through abstraction. Jess Xiaoyi Han, who grew up between New York and Shanghai, creates flowing, dynamic landscapes that reflect her inner emotions and psychology, often as direct references to specific moments and experiences. Though her color palette is soft, her brand of abstraction is vibrant and expressionistic, controlled by her meticulous brushwork. Each painting is centered with a luminous orb, which Han considers to be a representation of her soul.
Replete with dark washes of greens and blues, Xingzi Gu’s canvases are minimally populated with thinly drawn symbols – an open eye, a set of hands, a hanging belt. With breathy brushstrokes and watery colors, Gu hints at relationships dissolving, memories disappearing, and places in transition. The five-pointed star is an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party, for whom the shape represents unity. In Gu’s painting, though, a disembodied hand grips each point of the star, pulling the string taut to create a perfect shape. There is an underlying tension to the composition; if one hand lets go, the star is destroyed. Gu recalls her childhood memories of social and economic instability and cites that difficult period as one that informed her understanding of change, impermanence, love, and community.
Mystery and distance also play crucial roles in Tianshu Zhang’s mystical, celestial paintings. Zhang cites her nomadic childhood as the reason for her sensitivity to emotions and her impulse to lament the fleeting beauty of life. Each painting features amorphous figures fusing into the extraterrestrial background, fluctuating in the liminal space between coming into existence and fading out of it. Tinged with melancholy, Zhang’s ethereal canvases ask us why we feel lonely even though we live as social creatures and how we can become ourselves and feel completeness as human beings.
Inspired by the Transcendentalist philosophy that sees divinity in nature, Tiantian Ma’s works are a meditation of the universal spirit that animates all creation. In Manhattan, the city itself is an organic creature, lustrous and pulsing. The sea invites us in with its crooked, tidal fingers. Flower petals grow legs adorned with ballet flats. In Ma’s dreamworld, the human folds into the natural, and is nourished by it.
Born in Beijing but educated within Western institutions, Alice Jiang often finds herself conflicted and grappling between intertwining, sometimes opposing, cultural influences. She cites her displacement, inability to fully relate to either culture, and search for belonging as the creative fuel for her multi-dimensional works. Layered and fragmented, Jiang’s elaborate compositions are neo-Cubist studies of female figures whose distorted faces, features, and limbs fill the canvases. The figures’ entanglement reflects Jiang’s own confusion, dissociation, and emotional division within and across her communities.
Angela Wei’s illustration-inspired canvases are similarly all-over in composition. Little cartoon devils plague a blinded female figure in Inferno while tendrils of flames, flowers, and hair strands surround her flailing body. Wei creates a fantasy world that exists in the liminal space between the real and the imaginary; “each narrative depicted is a portal to a hallucinatory world of its own internal logic, dimensions, and time flow that are simultaneously otherworldly yet rooted in [Wei’s] own identity”. At the heart of Wei’s practice, though, is a love for storytelling, of both individual and universal experiences. Like dark children’s fables, disruptive messages are concealed within seemingly innocuous imagery, cuteness serving as a defense mechanism against unpleasant realities.
Populated with unconventional shapes and elements, Nianxin Li’s still lifes are unexpected studies of familial relationships. Snail-like creatures simultaneously rely on and guard against one another. Each twists and squeezes to carefully maintain balance in the group, creating an undercurrent of tension exacerbated by the uncommonly vertical canvases. Li’s vibrant use of color further delineates the separate creatures, their oversaturated tones contending with one another to create multiple visual centers. Rooted in “feelings of disconnect toward the traditional familial framework”, Li’s spunky, surreal canvases encapsulate the delicate balance of opposites that exists in all of our lives.
Just as the process of belonging metamorphoses dimly at first, so does the process of becoming an artist. Most of the women in the show are either current students or recent graduates of BFA and MFA programs. All are at the beginning of their creative journeys, nurturing brushstroke by brushstroke a visual language that is all at once personal, universal, and indelible.