Twists & Turns: Group Exhibition

Pekin Fine Arts (Hong Kong) is pleased to present an exhibition featuring five artists living and working in China and Hong Kong each of whose work addresses the psychological sensation brought on by radical and sudden change in the material world. Their artistic versatility shares a common need to react visually to the uneasy experience of living in an ever-changing environment.

Ink paintings by Tang Guo and Huang Zhiyang record fragments of traditional architectural forms and “dreamscape” jungle-like, impenetrable walls of vegetation. Both rely on memory invoking automatic responses to years of brushwork practice. Huang Zhiyang says he first randomly “creates a space and then proceeds to break it”. This “random” act seems to imply a state of creation somewhere between “automatic” and “unintentional”.

Daphné Mandel and Ryan LaBar, in drawing and collage, and ceramics, rely on layered structures cascading downward, defying the need for balance and equilibrium. The integrated forms are complex mixtures, busy and balanced at times. Others seem piled and chaotic. These systems are metaphors for our times, our bodies, and our philosophies.

Cynthia Sah’s stone sculptures in marble and granite, wrestle with finding balance in nature’s hardest elements. This imperfect process focuses less on harmony than on cutting to the core of the organic material, demonstrating its resistance to a sculptor’s cut and polish. Each of the five artists realizes possible outcomes are unknown, and rather, the creative process of unexpected twists and turns is what is on display.