Birth - Lake House Arts Center (Takapuna)
26 -31st January 2020 (Auckland - Takapuna)
Painfully beautiful. Struggling liberty.
Birth, a happening or thing, forever in the past, is the beginning from which life emanates and extends. Our first exhibition maps, visually and conceptually, various aspects of giving life: from the quirky to the confrontational to the my(s)thical. Conceived as a sculptural installation, it represents the coming into being and its transcendence while at the same time reflecting the will to playfully recontextualise materials/ views connected to their respective past. Prepare yourselves for a dialogue bridging the new and old, the conceptual and emotional, the tangible and intangible and the end and new beginnings. Sometimes witty and always original, this series of works by New Zealand/ Chinese artists Ada Leung and Minrui Yang celebrate the need to create something unfamiliar through things and views familiar.
Ada Leung graduated from Elam and proves to be a rare species
in the genus artist: an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking force. Her artworks, intertwined with the geometric qualities of the Nomadic Art Gallery itself thus giving it material energy, range from hundreds of lids formed into natural organic structures to parodying a tyre’s wheel to the fragile vigor of eggshells to plastic bottles held together by glue. In Ada’s work, nothing goes to waste. Every apparent loss is a new opportunity, a chance to start over and rethink about (y)our meaningless accumulation of things in a world full of stuff. Her artistic method can be compared to giving birth: falling in love, consumption, labour and lots of time. For some these re-readymade objects remain forever paralysed as the once mass-produced items for a particular usage, for others the possibilities, as producer or even consumer, are endless: DNA-structures, multiplying bacterial pendulums, egg snakes,… For some it even provides an unparalleled aesthetic experience. Waste only shows itself to be a false end, a ruse that masks the continuity and potentiality of things. Passing over the rational and the speculative side of religion, her work concentrates, in all its irony, on irrational aspects of our lazy consumerist existence. But the greatest pleasure and ingenuity lies in the role of the spectator: ultimately he/she recontextualises the artworks into a flowing world of colours, forms and meaning which humorously counter the ambivalence of the world we live in.
Minrui Yang also graduated from Elam and fuels our mystery of how our memories of space are often distorted and fragmented. Exhibiting a digital calligraphy installation countered by flapping “traditional” works inside, her artworks are in continuous transformation and catapult us to the beginning of all beginnings. The visual artist revisits and questions her and the coming into the world through the aesthetic lens of Shansui painting. She tests her and our perception of the world in change. With the use of fluid and carefree brushstrokes of ink on the silky fabric, she contemplates her own consciousness and lets our preconditioned mind drift along the charged lines. The evolving shapes and soft colors travel back to her Chinese roots which were largely informed through the practice of calligraphy and recognizing the Taoist notions of “presence and absence” in painting. Let yourself go and, who knows, you may revisit places that formed your identity and helped defined who you are today.