Cruel Spring: Jamie Chan, Ye Cheng, Xi Li, Dana Nechmad, Eunjung Park, Yongqi Tang

LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to announce Cruel Spring, a new group exhibition opening at our 64A Bayard St space on Saturday, March 11. The show comprises works by six artists Jamie Chan, Ye Cheng, Xi Li, Dana Nechmad, Eunjung Park, Yongqi Tang, across several mediums, including paintings, photography and video, all female. We also invite you to join our celebration of Women's Month, extended indefinitely.

Spring, the occultist, "breeding lilacs out of the dead land", again emerges with unstoppable energy, yet at the bottom of this emergence tumid veins quiver in the dark, suppressed by botanical color-the echoing of past eulogies. Like two opposing forces pulling on a rope, spring and winter-growth, decay-are a perfect equilibrium, and the definition of cyclicity. Spring is a complex, transforming, painful manifestation of birth. 

And like spring, art can be cruel. A sad beauty, shaded yet sharp, attracts our attention, and beckons with promises of joyful rebirth. But rebirth is the progeny of death, and the price of admission is not always posted on the big board. Subtle and grounded, these works are the bloodline of their respective makers, full disclosures of their introspection. 

An owl presides: a face bloodied at the butcher's, bunnies conferencing, naked ungendered humanoid bodies in the waste land, giving way to lifeless geometries that nevertheless reveal the presence of cognition, intelligence, humanity. With these avatars-human, humanoid, animate, inanimate-they encourage the use of allegory to elucidate the truths hidden at the intersection of our own internal seasonal shifts. 

EunJung Park

Eunjung Park's work includes painting, sculpture, and drawing.  She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Born in South Korea, Park received her BA from Kookmin University, her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2017.  Her personal history and experiences as an immigrant led to her interest in adaptation and change in both biological and cultural spheres.  Park explores this topic by layering images from multiple sources, such as human biology and botany.  She sees painting as a process of both mutation and migration-as she works, the forms appear, combine, transform and displace one another, spread throughout the canvas, disappear, and evolve into entirely new images.  They are in a constant state of flux, reenacting the transformations taking place within her at both cellular and cultural levels. Park's work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum, Below Grand Gallery, Doosan Gallery, 1969 Gallery, The Hole Gallery, Vox Populi, the Spring Break Art Show, Napoleon Gallery, the Riggs and Leidy Gallery at MICA, Nanji Publication Center, and SeoGyo Art Center in Korea.  She participated in the Bronx Museum AIM Program, the Vermont Studio Center Residency, The Studios at Mass MoCA,  and was a Semi-Finalist for the Sondheim Artscape Prize.  Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, New American Paintings, Hyperallergic and Bomb magazine.

Xi Li

Xi Li (b. 1995 Suzhou, China) is an artist who works with photography and video to address the unreliability of images and the impossibility of translating memories. Xi's work focuses on how personal and collective memory affect the perception of the past, in order to reckon with fictional and non-fictional realities. Xi's work has been exhibited in Green Hall Gallery at Yale School of Art in New Haven, MadeIn Gallery in Shanghai, Inna Art Space in New York and also has been featured in Cultured Magazine, Artforum, Nylon China, Jiazazhi, Musée Magazine and others. Her self-published book Traces of Invisibilities has been shortlisted for Photo 2020 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize. Xi is currently pursuing her MFA at the Yale School of Art.

Yongqi Tang

Having studied and worked between China and America, Yongqi Tang(b.1997) has been influenced by the drastically different cultural and ideological contexts of the two countries. Interested in how the interaction with the environing world would affect our existence, the artist questions and deconstructs her roles in both private and public spaces by investigating the social construction of identities through the act of painting and drawing. Yongqi's works examine the fluidity of our self-images and relate to the broader human experience of the ambiguousness of identities such as gender, sexuality, and nationality. Through blending allegories, myths, and symbols from both Western and Chinese Classicist traditions, she creates a playful in-betweenness to reinterpret the categories into which we are born to rearticulate the discourse around them.

Ye Cheng

Ye Cheng is a Chinese-American artist currently based in New York. Ye Cheng graduated with a MFA degree in Fine Art from the New School at Parsons, New York in 2022. And a BFA degree in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. Ye Cheng exhibited in M50 in Shanghai, China, Tree Art Gallery, China; Palazzo Jules Maidoff in Florence, Italy; and TAG gallery in Los Angeles; RHAA, Chicago. Her work was selected and featured among 2022 graduates in Artnet Newsletter in China, Art & Education. Ye Cheng is a multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, installations, and digital collages to address the experience of cultural displacement and the conception of home. Living as a first-generation immigrant, the experience has greatly impacted her vision of globalization. Ye relates the personal challenges to the larger state of multinational relations Through art, Ye examines alternative politics, seeking to revalue, reconstruct and redeploy cultural practice. ​

Jamie Chan

Jamie Chan, born in 1984, received an MFA in painting from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in 2013. The artist received a BFA from UCLA in Los Angeles, California in 2006.Exhibitions showing Chan's work have taken place at: Tif Sigfrids Gallery, in both Athens, Georgia and New York City; Ceysson et Bénétière in New York City; in an installation by Nancy Shaver at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California; and in various project spaces across New York City and Los Angeles, California.In 2018, Chan co-authored a 4Columns review regarding an exhibition of paintings shown inside a mall in Chinatown in New York City. The artist's writing has also appeared in the collection This Long Century. Jamie Chan's paintings depict mundane marginalia like early baseball cards as well as excerpts of Dutch renaissance paintings. The artist's palette draws from post-impressionist works, pairing muted tones with gesture-like applications of symbolic color. Chan approaches painting as a medium of constant transformation and transition-frequently exploring the hand's role in the creation, circulation and acquisition of images.

Dana Nechmad

Dana Nechmad is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, drawing, embroidery and video. She is interested in moments of emotional threshold and how they are manifested in the body. Through figurative, abstract and textual gestures, Nechmad brings to the surface internal marks experienced within.