SPRING/BREAK Art Show NY 2022
#1049, 10th Floor, 625 Madison Ave, New York, NY
September 7 - 12, 2022 Contact: annie.lingfei@gmail.com
New Work by Jessica Wee Curated by Lingfei Ren
The Shape of Self
New York, NY — Independent curator Lingfei Ren is pleased to presentThe Shape of Self, a solo show of work by artist Jessica Wee. Relaxing, playful and enjoyable, yet touched with uncanny myst, Wee uses subjects to reflect herself, creating works from memories, dreams and imaginations. Her paintings tell stories through her personal experiences, philosophy of life, art history symbolism, and multicultural folktales.
We are hopeful that the pandemic era is nearly at its end, with entertainment coming back, mask mandates being lifted and travel restrictions loosened, but our lives are still far from returning to normal. During the past two years, the world has slowed down and given us the chance to rethink and reevaluate the meaning of life. Jessica Wee created these paintings in Montreal, which were inspired by her deeply bonded sisterhood with her first Korean friend Seulgi when she lived in Brooklyn, New York, from 2017 to 2020. After a short trip to Montreal in the spring of 2020, Wee was not able to return due to the closure of the border as the pandemic grasped both the U.S. and Canada. As a diasporic Asian artist of Korean origin who has lived in Canada, France, Italy, and the U.S., Wee has a complex relationship with the notion of cultural identity. The three years of stay with Seulgi awakened her Korean spirit —— applying seaweed facial masks, watching K-dramas and Korean manga, eating traditional snacks and taking along good-luck charms. Wee paints Seulgi in her works, renders elements from the multiple cultural identities to create a surrealist dreamscape, while mirroring herself onto Seulgi to express her cultural heritage, and commemorate her experience in New York and those joyous days with friends. This discontinuity from a sense of “home” has also compelled her to negotiate her own ways of being in the present.
Working simultaneously with the disparities between the historic and the contemporary, Euro-Western and pan-Asian, Wee playfully engages with the question of ”Who I am”. Her works open a zone for imagination in which the viewer can contemplate their own narrative and reflect themselves.
L’intime
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches
2022
Using digital collage to interweave elements, an intimate view of multiple selves appears. By assembling gestures and movements intimate moments become a thread of references that connect multiple selves together. This painting is an invitation into the intimate space of daily life, but not by way of voyeurism, which is how it often has been done by male painters in the past.
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches
2022
Using digital collage to interweave elements, an intimate view of multiple selves appears. By assembling gestures and movements intimate moments become a thread of references that connect multiple selves together. This painting is an invitation into the intimate space of daily life, but not by way of voyeurism, which is how it often has been done by male painters in the past.
Ladies of the lake
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches
2022
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches
2022
| I reinterpret the iconic motif of the Three Graces: my friends and I, lakeside. This painting depicts one summer spent at the lake with my girlfriends. I choose to represent us as nude in order to evoke the sense of freedom we felt that day, and as a nod to well-known depictions of the three graces by Botticelli, Raphael, and Fernand Léger. |
Gaia
Oil on canvas
30 x 36 inches
2022
Oil on canvas
30 x 36 inches
2022
| A simple composition allows the viewer moments of rest around the main pictorial elements. This is a cosmic representation of Gaia, my dog, next to a hybrid woman-goddess who is a composite portrait of me and my friends. When I read articles about life on other planets I think about my dog Gaia, named after the earth goddess. Here she is smiling at you, saying hi. |
Spa is the place
Oil on canvas
36 x 30 inches
2022
Oil on canvas
36 x 30 inches
2022
| A figure floats, almost fusing with the water, as if in an outer-space, Korean spa. The figure of the bather is a classic image in art history, but for me this piece was not about representing the naked body but about the body's suspension in water. The figure is placed as if floating in an outer-space, Korean spa. By depicting the water stylistically, I convey the body fusing with the water, and the sensation of melting. |