Shuling Guo & Nianxin Li: Our Currents Unleashed
LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to announce that "Our Currents Unleashed," featuring artists Nianxin Li and Shuling Guo, will open on Friday, May 3rd, 2024, at our Manhattan Chinatown space. Curated by Yunyi Yang, this curated two-person show will exhibit around 10 of both artist's current works.
"If we were a river, Nianxin would be positioned upstream, while I would be downstream," exclaimed artist Guo Shuling after learning about Li Nianxin’s practice, marking the beginning of this duo-exhibition. Despite their divergent styles, they converge on a shared female perspective and a sensuous approach to artistic expression. In this exhibition, both artists venture into bolder stage of artistic expressions, reflecting a new understanding of art, life, and relationships between the two.
Li Nianxin’s creations stem from pure sensory perception, reacting to a personal experience to gender role and societal norms within the family context. Employing a solid foundation in classical oil painting techniques alongside spray gun methods and neon colors, she has developed a unique aesthetic deeply rooted in “the Screen Age” she grew up in and continued to refine her visual language within the past few years.
In her latest works, the organism protagonists in the images continue Li’s exploration of themes related to visceral experiences, entanglement, and intimacy, only this time simplified down to forms resembling “ropes.” While the screen-like light sources remain, the artist has become more daring in the extensive use of single colors and depicting skin-like textures through subtle tonal variations.
Similarly, if we were to see Guo Shuling’s previous works a response to the sailing life through which the artist constructed her visual language, this exhibition presents the artist’s first "Vipassana" after internalizing such aesthetics.
Building on the vibrant color palette from her previous works, her latest pieces now feature an abundance of complementary colors, blending and colliding in a marvelous manner through layers of glazing. Combined with the vertical symmetry of her compositions, the images evoke an ascending dynamic.
These changes correspond to the awakening of Guo’s female awareness in her post-childbirth. Choosing to directly depict the intuitive images that come to her mind, the artist captures the gentle or intense energy inherent in these bodily metaphors during the process of layering and repeated coloring, using painting as an identity affirmation and method to observe the experience of motherhood.
In Li Nianxin and Guo Shuling, we witness a fundamentally inward creative approach. Instead of fixating on the depiction of figures and their iconographic undertones, they place their full trust in a wisdom that arises from sensory experiences to convey complex themes beyond the realms of linguistic and rational expression.
Female perspective, body, and visceral experiences—these words have now become clichés in the art world. But it is only now, as the fervor subsides, that we can observe the evolution of female artists' creative processes with a more objective perspective.
The artists’ individual responses to intimate relationships and family life remain a common creative impetuse, while the intertwining of life and art practice through the portrayal of sensory experiences leads to a coherent yet ever-changing temperament embedded in self-development narrative.
This pattern is not new to many female artists throughout history—from Georgia O'Keeffe, who early on diverged from her husband’s interpretation of her floral works to Lee Krasner, who described her works as highly “biographical”, and Louise Bourgeois, who courageously and candidly presented her intimate life experiences.
These artists do not proclaim their lives through vehement or narrative means, yet they spontaneously and fully depict complex female experiences that they lived through, much like rivers crossing mudflats, inadvertently leaving their marks in a process devoid of intention.
By placing the two artists in juxtaposition both spatially and conceptually, this exhibition not only aim to create an intimate dialogue between the two artists, but also aims to, through a metaphorical overview of this imaginary river, discover the wisdom and strength shared by more female artists throughout art history.
