Three-Legged Crow: Maddy Bohrer, Ingrid Lu, Tiantian Lou, Ray Hwang, Wheedong Daniel Kim, Jia Sung, Jessica Wee, Yukine Yanagi
Opening in spring, right after Chūnfēn—a term for the spring equinox, the lunisolar calendar, a time of vibrant growth—this show aims to celebrate the flourishing minds of young talented artists after the long hibernation of our city. Three-legged Crows opens on Apr 8th, 2022 and will be on view throughout the month. The corresponding online exhibition on Artsy will be on till the end of April.
The title of the show - Three-legged Crows - comes from Eastern Asian legends. In Chinese culture, it is believed that there are ten of them. They are the wheeler of the ten suns in the sky and symbols of reviving vitality and never-withering strength. Echoing the name, this show accumulates the most vibrant and thriving motifs and images generated recently by our artists, as a sign of resilience towards the freezing winter and unfortunate pandemic. In response to the recent dreadful incidents that happened in the Asian communities in NYC, Three-legged Crows presents you with a mix of poetry and politics among the works on view, representing the optimistic blossoming vitality of creative minds in the face of misfortunes.
Our curatorial team started envisioning the show at the beginning of the year. We hope to invite and gather our community to Manhattan Chinatown in the colorful springtime. Although the fluctuating winter weather and Omicron outburst stalled our efforts by a few months, we’re happy to finally share with you the efforts of months-long preparation. This process of putting together the show also parallels the prolonged struggles we have all experienced in the past winter, resembling the resurrection and resilient livelihood after the seemingly endless hardship.
Three-legged Crows collects ten main pieces from our artists including old friends of the gallery and new companionships we’ve built along the way. Using Three-legged Crows as a thread, LATITUDE presents you with a collective growth path of our community and hopes to bond and further link our community in keeping with the unpredictable times.
Yukine’s practice began with the depiction of the psychological, dream-like landscape, full of figurative and beast-like apparitions wearing decorated costumes. Fashioning the figures with delicately designed expressions and costumes, Yukine built the unworldly place for whimsical and meditative contemplation. Through creating allegorical narratives with her subjects, Yukine explores ideas of cultural histories, Chinese and Japanese folklore, personal relationships, spiritualism through the lens of biocentrism, and an obsession with the grotesque, melancholia, and death. She attempts to weave contemporary understanding and experiences with whimsical humor and wit. Her work is inspired by movements in Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Abstract-Expressionism, Surrealism, and traditional East-Asian folk arts– especially woodblock prints and puppetry.
As a diasporic Asian artist of Korean origin who has lived in Canada, France, Italy, and the U.S., Jessica Wee has always had a complex relationship with the notion of cultural identity. Discontinuity from a sense of “homeland” has impelled her to negotiate her own ways of being in the present. Like putting together multiple shattered characters into one being, she creates pieces with fragmented memories and identities from various times and places. With her solid foundation in Classical oil painting techniques learned in Italy for four years, she recently focuses on creating surreal dreamscapes of hybrid creatures and anthropomorphic plants on canvas coated with traditional Korean rice/mulberry paper that explores her convoluted relationship with different cultures.
Growing up as a second-generation Asian American, Ray Hwang constantly finds himself in between contrasting decisions and thoughts being in the middle of two cultures. Constantly revisiting these memories as well as his works, Hwang sees the elements in his paintings like actors in a player, as they are responding to a director, an unreliable narrator, who loathes the idea of rehearsal. Along with the specific references from his life, like a playground dragon sculpture, a power ranger action figure, or the durian fruit; this cast of characters is morphed into a cartoon-ish, painterly fiction of personal folklore that suggests and alludes to how multiplicity, code-switching, internal drama, and cross-cultural contradictions have frequently intersected throughout his life.
Curation and text by shuang cai
