Plusieurs Rêves: Jessica Wee

As the summer steps into New York, LATITUDE Gallery warmly welcomes you to Jessica Wee’s first solo exhibit in New York: Plusieurs Rêves. This exhibition includes a collection of Jessica’s 12 recent paintings that are mainly inspired by her experiences living in New York from 2017 to 2020. The exhibition will be on view from May 5th till June 12th, and the eponymous Artsy online showroom will be on view till the end of July. 

As a diasporic Asian artist of Korean origin who has lived in Canada, France, Italy, and the U.S., Jessica has always had a complex relationship with the notion of cultural identity. Yet, her discontinued sense of “homeland” and disorientation from the clashing cultures have given her an unexpected gift, her own ways of carpe diem. As a ramification of her diasporic experience, she creates worlds consisting of different cultures and identities fragmented memories and identities where she inhabits multiple characters and places all at once.

Jessica spent four years studying Old Master’s technique in Italy where the training exposed her to western art historical elements. In her recent works, Jessica introduced elements from Greco-Roman and Renaissance in a surrealist dreamscape, forming these hybrid creatures with the free-flowing patterns and creatures from Korean folklore. Working with an expanded archive of images found both in life and online, Jessica used CGI modeling to lend a sheen of realism to enigmatic compositions of multilayered pastiche, suspended somewhere between touchscreens and dreams.

The selected works in this exhibition are inspired by Jessica's experience living in New York from 2017 to 2020. Growing up in Paris and Montreal, Jessica made her first Korean friend, Seulgi, in Brooklyn in her late 20s. Coincidentally in parallel to one of the current Korean feminist manifestos: women supporting women. Jessica's sisterhood with Seulgi ended up being Jessica’s bolster even way after their original acquaintance. During the uncertain times, this precious but strong sisterhood supported and fueled Jessica turning her traumatic experiences of the pandemic into a crucial aspect of her pieces. According to Jessica, little things – like the solitary bathing rituals and face masks, drinking beers and joking, cooking “Jjapaguri” with steak after watching Parasite, and listening to Korean psych music – formed the sisterhood that still entices her to this day. The pieces were created after Jessica was forced to leave Brooklyn as not only a tribute to her memories of New York – the normal but joyful life she lived with Seulgi and that she couldn’t have anymore – but also a souvenir of her cultural awakening that she gleaned from her past happiness. 

Being part of the minority-female-run LATITUDE Gallery, our curatorial team hopes to invite you on a nuanced and whimsical journey about Jessica’s precious memory. As Jessica explores the complexity and fluidity of cultural identity through both creating a hybrid content and experimenting with a hybrid material in her recent work series Hanji, we aim to puzzle together the charming little moments to Plusieurs rêves (many dreams) that she depicted onto the crafted canvas.