MadeIn Gallery is honored to present a joint exhibition by three artists Liu Wa, Pu Yingwei and Su Yu-Xin opening on January 11, 2020 (until February 28th) and titled “Moon Milk”, “China Capital” and “Almost No Memory” respectively, showcasing these artists’ latest works.
Liu Wa is an artist whose work encompasses installation, moving image and painting. Through the lens of anthropology and neuroscience, she explores the subjectivity and fluidity of human emotions and perception. Her interdisciplinary practices reimagine the concepts of agency and self-awareness in the context of post-humanism, reflecting on the power dynamics between humanity and technology.
Her latest project “Moon Milk” includes a single-channel video sharing the same title, and a series of unique sculptures. The video begins with a dream in an anesthesia state during a craniotomy to end into a satirical comment on the industrialization development and the call for urban upgrading, all materialized into a series of sculptures appearing in the video work. The documentary on craniotomy surgery echoes with Italo Calvino’s fantasy novel The Complete Cosmicomics; the process where doctors remove brain tumors also resemble a moon milk purification ritual in a factory within the dream. Borrowing from Italian and Chinese narratives, the protagonist in the video walks between dream and reality, transcending the boundaries between material and immaterial, and reimagining the multiple possibilities of human nature.
Pu Yingwei’s work is based on the artist’s personal observation of real situations. Through his practice, involving art creation, exhibition, writing, publishing, lecture and more, Pu revisits and parodies political historical texts, adding to narratives spanning over ethnic, national, linguistic, colonial issues and other grand topics his own non-fictional history writing.
China Capital runs through two main aspects of Pu’s latest practice, one being the reflection on the national strategy in the current global context caused by the political question of personal identity, while the other consists of the historical analysis under socialist culture and traditional ethics in relation to personal life experience. China Capital is derived from a painting produced by the artist in 2019, its style responds to the “political pop“ movement appeared in the post-89 era. The two main tendances of this movement: “politics” and the power, ideologies it relates to, and “pop” together with the implicated capital and consumerism culture, still constitute the two main perspectives that dominate the current Chinese scene. The concept of China Capital is an intersection of numerous creative directions developed by the artist in recent years. Exhibited works include videos and paintings.
Su Yu-Xin’s paintings and other media practice revolve around the capturing of connections between visual, language and neural perception. Her paintings often present unique colors, light, and visual perception, with combinations of still-life, landscapes, graphics, information fragments and memories, as well as multiple tracks, time zones, screen impressions. Seizing images and pictures through her paintings, Su’s works excel in showing the flow of time in still images, and emphasize on the act of painting and its materiality, using handmade paint and the texture of the canvas to express the matter of the painting process itself.
The title Almost No Memory is adapted from a short story by Lydia David. When accumulated memory is not enough to operate; and that sober consciousness is triggered, the map of reflection is unfolded. In a certain sense, the transposed title reflects the artist’s understanding on the act of painting, achieved one at a time they can neither be recalled nor reproduced. The dried marks and their meanings are reinvented through each viewing and the context in which they are viewed. The exhibited wood board painting series “Everyday About This Time” depicts borrowed images of the surface of the sea, the landscape drifting in the clouds has been sectioned at the horizon and reassembled, to only become a slice; “Almost No Memory” translates the spatial distance from the plane canvas and the time invested in the painting process; two other large-scale works depict rivers and reflections with unusual perspectives, and poetic, continuous flowing images are progressively unveiled through the derived, refracted and reiterated act of painting.
About the exhibition
Dates: Jan 11, 2020 - Feb 28, 2020
Venue: MadeIn Gallery
Courtesy of the artists and MadeIn Gallery, for further information please visit www.madeingallery.com.
