“I wanted to paint light,
but all I’ve drawn out is darkness.”
- Emily Wang, Excavation (2021)
Change— a result of constant struggle between opposing forces— makes the world we live in. The awareness of the tension and potentials between the dual force— in life as in nature— has profoundly influenced artist Emily Wang’s personal life and life’s pursuit.
Wang has always been an outlander— political, cultural, and community-wise— a role she involuntarily inherited by her upbringing, which has since become a unique part of her existence and a position she willingly assumes. The sense of non-belonging motivates her to surpass the either-or stance and “to see the way things come together” (Charles W. Hawthorne, 1960). This is reflected in both her intellectual and artistic pursuit.
Tell Me a Story is composed of three parts. Each is a step further into the artist’s exploration of the dynamic tension between opposing forces through her re-framing of the dual nature of Venusian symbolism. Finally, a few clues from the artist’s previous works are included to establish the crucial role “duality” plays among her seemingly diverse practices.
Interlacing the visual (painting) with the verbal/poetic (poetry), each area has a poem by the artist on the wall or floor to initiate dialog with the paintings. By colliding and coalescing two different mediums of expression, the exhibition space is transformed into an allegorical space to invoke a sense of mythical experience as part of the artist’s exploration.
The drawing and the poem combination in the opening section engages the theme directly— the artist’s yearning for arcadia or eternity— through its absence. By pairing an unfinished drawing with a poem that only hints at the possibility of a new form of existence, the artist answers the title of her exhibition that the quest for a promised land has no end and is always unfolding.
The main area of the exhibition consists of paintings Wang selected from 2016— when her exploration related to this exhibition began— till present.
Wang defines herself a colorist, the battle between color and drawing has long been an important aspect of her work. There is a complex spatial dynamic in her painting as a result of simultaneous interaction between color and form. The shifting of focus or viewing angle changes the inter-relation of forms in each painting that enables the morphing of new forms and potential narrative-shifts. What appears to be haunting or perplexing at first glance may become gentle as one’s gaze shifts across the painting.
The two large-scale double-sided paintings offer a new aspect of the battle between color and drawing. Through serendipity, Wang adopts a new textile material as her canvas. Unexpectedly, some heavy painted strokes penetrate the surface and make the backside a drawing itself that creates distinct visual quality and meaning from the painting in the front. This expands the dimension of dialogue between painting and drawing for the artist.
In Wang’s practice, each painting is not the product of preconceived ideas. The title for each painting emerged through hindsight and acts as a device to initiate dialogue with the painting— as correlation or counterpoint— and to re-frame mythical symbolisms through their interworking. Meanwhile, one may find that the poems are not written in the artist’s native language. This exemplifies the artist’s sense of non-belonging as her true identity rather than an absence of one; another aspect of duality this exhibition intends to point out.
This exhibition invites the viewer to participate in the multilayer quality of the artist’s pursuit of timeless value and eternal happiness. It is a constant confrontation with its dark counterpart. Always approaching but never arriving, yet in the artist’s own words, “the door of unbecoming leads to the door of being.”