Me & My Plurals: Yosub Koh and Angela Fang Zirbes
LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to present Me & My Plurals, a dual show featuring the figure paintings of Yosub Koh and Angela Fang Zirbes curated by Donglang “James” Xue. Discovering along different paths, both Koh and Fang Zirbes attempt to push the genre of figure painting beyond its conventional potential of singular and teleological depictions of figures, and instead suggest that everyone is a plurality.
A threat we face in contemporary society is the oversimplification of personhood in our daily and professional lives. We are first reduced to human resources, and then categorized into different titles meant to serve certain functions. Such a condition only deteriorates in the digital society. In the name of efficiency and convenience, we are turned into data in various forms of polls and algorithms. A person becomes nothing more than a tenant to the property owner, a view to the influencer, or a vote to the politician, but never an active and solid person with emotions, senses, histories, and thoughts.
Facing the oversimplification and objectification of personhood, the Martiniquian decolonial philosopher Édouard Glissant proposes opacity as a way of social interaction that embraces plurality. The method of opacity acknowledges the plurality of everyone without forcing anyone to be explicit about oneself or interpreting the building blocks of one’s personhood. This exhibition therefore employs opacity as a method to approach the painted figures, the paintings, and the artists in a poetic and sensual manner that embraces their plurality without generalization, and to provide a moment of repose from the digital society for the audience.
Yosub Koh’s paintings bring the conventional figure paintings into question. Sensitive and thoughtful toward his reading and social experiences, Koh believes that a person should be understood as a plurality, a figure with multiple sentiments, movements, and opaque social relations all at once. His figures always negotiate with their past selves, which constantly haunt and reshape their identities.
To visualize such a philosophy, he experiments with the Korean traditional hanji paper, which becomes translucent after applied with gel. Benefited by this material quality, the artist aligns several sheets of paper each painted with a different figure of a person, and the figures are able to merge into one as the lower layers appear in the upper ones. While the individual figure captures the person at a moment, the layering brings a more vivid person to the viewing eyes.
Angela Fang Zirbes’s paintings suggest alternative answers to Koh’s question. While her previous works focus on the theme of fear and privacy in domestic scenes, her recent group of works turn toward the sentiments of curiosity and hesitation which bourgeon and develop in her interactions with the surrounding world. Here in Fang Zirbes’s paintings, plurality is in the vast expanded field of the figure.
While the facial expression of her self portrait stays calm, the artist outsources her self-expression onto recurring subject matters such as the field, the animals, and the plants which would stand for personal and private discussions around her past, her connections with living environment, or her complex and negotiating moods that cannot be articulated in one or two words. Fang Zirbes’s paintings can therefore be read as poems, and through embedding her message of self-expressions in the poetic topos, she leaves us at an open-ended point of imagination for an appreciation of plurality.
In Koh and Fang Zirbes’s paintings, we can see a shared interest in expanding the painting medium’s magic of conveying a plural of messages through graphic language. In doing so, they push figure painting to a frontier that overcomes its impossibility to carry a figure’s plurality within a single frame. By appreciating their paintings, we rediscover the joy to always be curious about others and think about others as a true path toward preserving each other’s humanity in this rapidly digitizing world.
Donglang “James” Xue is an art historian, curator, and writer from Beijing, China, currently based in New York. His work concerns the visibility, virtuality, and individuality in contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic art with postmodern and decolonial methods. He holds a B.A. in Art History from UC San Diego and an M.A. in Contemporary Art History from Columbia University, and he is a Kathryn Wasserman Davis Fellow at Columbia.
