Conceive:

LATITUDE Gallery presents you with our new group show Conceive: 怀耘构月. Opening on January 23rd, 2022, this show will be on view during the Chinese lunar new year in Chinatown at the heart of New York. Curated by Shuang Cai and the gallery team, Conceive invites eight emerging Asian artists to reflect on their experiences during the “post-pandemic” year. The physical exhibition will be open till February 18th and the online version on Artsy will close at the end of February.

Inspired by surrealism–works that investigate the subconscious dreamscape and unveil the poetic or even the absurd, this show represents the creative at- tempt of contemporary Asian artists to materialize and tame the uncanny minds. In the context of metaverse–a decades old term–coming into trend over the past months, we believe that the works of art we present in this show vitalizes the digital world. Those artworks inject livelihood into the seemingly intangible world of imagination and offer access to each and every one of the audience. Con- ceive presents you with the testimony of the otherworld and shows the con- ceived spaces that were embryonated by artists’ prolific minds.

Other than the shared theme, our eight young artists also share the common thread of having boundary experience in their personal lives: the generation they were born into, the social culture they inhabit and the times they live in. Living in between cultures in contemporary American society at the time of the pandem- ic, these young Asian artists’ shared experiences create synergies among their practices. This then allows our curatorial team to investigate the rawness and uniqueness in those words by juxtaposition, mirroring and deflecting with humor.

With Conceive, LATITUDE Gallery invites you to a voyage on the edges of the physical limbo between realities and imaginations, in search of the tangible beauties in the multifarious familiarities and estrangement.

At the beginning of the lunar new year, coincidentally the two year anniversary of LATITUDE Gallery, we, along with the talented and resilient artists, present you with the incredible works of Asian artists in the historical Chinatown neighbor- hood. We welcome all with our bright and warm new location and our diaspora fellows to convene and celebrate the lunar new year. It is our sparkling shared recollections and dreams that the artists at Conceive are attempting to knead and shape. Conceive is, then, alluding a warm and stuffed dumpling that ani- mates the linkage between the awakened and dozed.

Curation and text by shuang cai