(ps- I made it to Sweden safe and sound and am gobbling up lots of fish.)
Arario Gallery is very proud to present Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian, an ambitious survey exhibition featuring the work of nearly fifty artists curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng.
Irrelevant wishes to highlight artists who are more American than Asian, based in New York, and embedded in an expansive community of emerging artists struggling to show and succeed in this cutthroat city. You will not find paintings about the Cultural Revolution or Mao Zedong that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will not find manga-infused characters performing acts of hypersexuality nor will you find decorative miniature drawings with motifs embedded within a specific cultural history.
What you’ll find is a surging flow of creativity where artists actively engage in their practice, exploring the absurd within everyday experience, the use and misuse of materials both new and found, and the curiosity of defining artistic practice. Food and consumption is considered within an urban agricultural environment, and social interaction is taken out of norm and reenacted in refreshing alternative ways. Pictured narratives gear toward a dark and isolated realm and obsession is the source behind abstracted images.
A major focus of this exhibition is to formulate a community, building a foundation for artists to gather and exchange ideas and experiences. There is an endless array of amazing underrepresented artists in NY, thriving yet unheard. Through this exhibition we get to see artists engaging with their given role and their interests within a particular medium, exploring on both conceptual and idealistic levels with painting, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. We get to see abstraction within the everyday and the everyday within abstraction. We get to see materials unfolded, manipulated, reworked and dysfunctioned. We get to feel self-conscious and hyper aware of our stance as viewers, where time and space is altered and questioned.
Irrelevant is a friendly and humorous, and somewhat ridiculous, rejection of a neurotic art market and its obsession with specifying artists to a particular culture and ethnicity. This exhibition purifies and de-labels the artist as Asian, by labeling the artist as Asian, to be shown inside a contemporary Asian art gallery.
Artists:
Seong Min Ahn, Shin Young An, Sophia Chai, Louis Chan, Karen Chan, Rona Chang, Gigi Chen, Yoon Cho, Micah Ganske, Hyoungsun Ha, Geujin Han, Takashi Horisaki, Jane V. Hsu, Hidenori Ishii, Hong Seon Jang, Kyoung Eun Kang, Heige Kim, Seung Ae Kim, Nancy Kim, Hein Koh, Shizuka Kusayanagi, Amy Fung-yi Lee & Caroline Jung-ah Park, JaeEun Lee, Sinae Lee, Soo Im Lee, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Pixy Liao, Juri Morioka, Tadashi Moriyama, Joel Morrison, Dominic Neitz, Christian Nguyen, Asuka Osawa, Eung Ho Park, Youngna Park, Jung Eun Park, R&D, Ruijun Shen, Satomi Shirai, Hidemi Takagi, Tattfoo Tan, Kikuko Tanaka, Jason Tomme, Mai Ueda, Kako Ueda, InJoo Whang, Mika Yokobori, Yejin Yoo, Jayoung Yoon, Seldon Yuan
Gallery hours are Monday thru Friday 10-6pm and by appointment.
Contact info@ararionewyork.com for more information.
* PERFORMANCES & WORKSHOPS
July 1st, 6-8pm
OPENING RECEPTION
Mai Ueda Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian
Mai Ueda sees situation as art and personality as performance, she will be highlighting those Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don't Make Work About Being Asian during the opening of the show to be seen as performance.
Takashi Horisaki Handmade Communication
Dimensions variable, 2004, Viewer interactive performance, Latex, powder, cotton, chair, table
A group of artists apply latex to participants’ hands and peel it off while discussing their hands, personal histories and personalities. After the hands are stuffed and labeled with a tag bearing the participant’s signature, they are installed on the wall of the site as a record of the performance and participants.
Jane Hsu What We Can Do in Florida
Single channel video, live voice & electronic music: Jane Hsu (video), Juan Calderon, Chia En-Hsieh (electronic instruments) Suzanne Gughrie (voice)
In a bright palette of anxious energy, a 7-foot latex Peanut man “What Can We Do in Florida,” is a video, voice, and musical performance based on the gestures of Mr. Peanut, who hops to the rhythm of humidity and decay in subtropical Miami. The piece reveals life’s unseen predators as we become highly mesmerized and hypnotized by terrible things. The vocal performance is a collection of found memories and record conversations from hotel holidays in Florida. Mr. Peanut is supported in part from the Peanut Pals, a global association of Mr. Peanut collectors and enthusiasts.
Hidemi Takagi Blender Project
Blender is a lens into New York's immigrant communities and cultures. The artist will have an interactive show using “Blender Cart” in which she gives out samples of various international food and culturally connected products with Information notes about immigrants and communities to the public to take home and to learn about that culture through these food imports.
July 8th, 7pm
Kyoung Eun Kang In & Out
The plastic back and cotton candy traverse the inside and outside of the artist in an act of swallowing, pulling out, and eating by herself and by others. Through the performance, the artist presents her identity as a shifting and moving state that is never fixed or preestablished.
July 15th, 7pm
Tattfoo Tan Composting Know-how with Master Composter Tattfoo Tan
Have questions about starting your own composting bin? Having problems maintaining a healthy bin? Learn from the Master Composter on duty.
8pm
Jane Hsu Platypus
Single channel video, percussion, bassoon & electronic music: Jane V Hsu (video), Juan Calderon, Chia En-Hsieh (compositions) Michael Perdue (copper pots), Annie Lyle (bassoon)
A group of platypus pups are born to the improvised music of the bassoon, copper pots, and electronic instruments. “Platypus, They Said,” performed by The Meanwhile, a New York based contemporary music ensemble that experiment with familiar harmonic language and unexpected combinations of instruments. The platypus is a venomous animal that finds its prey with electrolocation, the ability to sense electric fields. The title of the piece is derived from Duras’ play, “Destroy, She Said,” about the interactions of three strangers staying in an empty hotel amongst the possible chaos of war.
July 22nd, 7pm
Karen Chan Invisibility: Captured on Super 8mm Film
This workshop will introduce the art of super 8mm filmmaking by taking a look at some of the most provocative and important works shot on super 8mm from the 1960s-70s. Works by Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, and Bruce Baille, are amongst the pieces that will be shown, as well as select works by Karen Chan, who will be leading the workshop. An open discussion will follow on the concepts, styles, and techniques used, as well as the special characteristics of the super 8 medium that allows room for exploration. Super 8mm cameras will be on hand and participants will learn the basics of camera functions and shooting. The workshop will close with a group collaboration in the making of a film on the theme: invisibility. ($10 Suggested Donation)
8pm
Tattfoo Tan Conversation about Urban Gardening
Conversation with a round table of urban gardeners and artists that are involved in the green movement.
July 29th, 7pm
Kikuko Tanaka Tragic Bambi: A Mother’s Tears
As a part of the ongoing series of work, which evolves around a recurring motif of urination on Bambi, an interactive performance/installation, “A Tragic Bambi: Mother’s Tears” developed out of an image that persisted in the artist’s mind: the image of a mother in a Japanese traditional apron, who keeps gluing pearls on a decapitated head of Bambi. The attire worn in the piece is a stereotypical apron for Japanese blue-color mothers, which the artist didn’t have but wished to have had in her childhood. In the piece, the artist transforms herself into an object of love, merging the boundary of the self/other and reality/imagination. The idea of the fantasy mother, whose existence relays on its absence, resonates with the very concept of utopia, which manifests though out the piece in various forms, such as the Crystal Palace, the Museum on top of the mountain, androgynous objects, phallic mother, marriage, state of trance through repetition and symbiotic experience. The basis of the piece is “necrophilia.” It is based on my secret romantic/aesthetic affairs with dead writers, artists and artworks.
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