The New York-based Li Tang Gallery, in collaboration with independent curator, artist Yukiko Nakashima, proudly presents the Where We Are exhibition on July 1, 2024. This marks Li Tang’s first collaboration with an independent curator, expanding Li Tang’s focus from showcasing outstanding artists to also including remarkable curators. The participating artists, Inna Babaeva, Kenta Furusho, Julia Wagner, and Yukiko Nakashima, come from diverse artistic backgrounds.
This exhibition poses a philosophical question to contemporary society, which is filled with uncertainty and chaos: Where are we?
Inna Babaeva’s works create an unsettling balance through the unconventional combination of glass with mass-produced items like paper and buckets. In the series Under Pressure, organic glass in the shape of flasks is clamped between wooden blocks, maintaining a fragile sense of compression, stability, and tension. Babaeva’s transformation of materials shifts the audience’s habitual perceptions of everyday objects, pointing to the fragility inherent in the inertia of contemporary life.
Kenta Furusho’s wooden sculpture series Fallen Branches features hundreds of scar-like engravings on densely painted surfaces, creating a grotesque visual effect. This allows viewers to glimpse the rich history and life once held by natural materials. Furusho’s abstract works remind audiences that fleeting attention to mundane objects can reveal profound meanings in life.
Julia Wagner’s video and sound pieces deconstruct the semantics of language in contemporary society in a dramatic and poetic manner. Through deliberate manipulation and distortion, she strips words of their original meanings. In Water Poems, words dissolved in water are fragmented into meaningless symbols, deconstructing the authority of English words. Wagner’s works challenge monolingualism in the United States and address information misuse and misinterpretation in society.
Yukiko Nakashima’s abstract paintings combine the broken strokes of Japanese calligraphy with Western impasto techniques. The force of colors disrupts abstract masses, transforming them into nameless, floating forms. Nakashima’s abstract works reflect her psychological states and fragments of memory, continually evolving and mutating, preventing any cohesion and making “wholeness” an impossible task. This metaphor highlights the disordered state of identity in her cross-cultural life, keeping her in an “in-between” state.
Academic director Huixian Dong interprets the exhibition: “Where We Are is a thoughtful exhibition that presents the states of being ‘in-between.’ It orchestrates a fluid interplay of sensations, transitions, and abstractions, culminating in a calm yet semi-melancholic reflection on our era of information overload. Each artwork serves as a reminder of the importance of embracing transitional states, allowing for deeper understanding and contemplation in our everyday lives.”
The works of these four artists are based on artistic practice to analyze and reflect contemporary social issues. They believe that only through artistic practice can genuine dialogue be achieved. Interestingly, their works deliberately avoid direct answers, instead offering insights into the transitional stages of human daily identity, providing viewers with more space for reflection.
Where We Are exhibition will be held from July 1 to August 31, 2024. The online art space is free and open to the public.
(Text by Huixian Dong, Poster design: Sophie Ruoyu Zhang, Images courtesy of Li Tang)
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