Night Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition In Reality with LA based artist Yuh-Shioh Wong. Through her intrinsic understanding of the natural world, Wong’s paintings communicate the inherent structure of things- through shape, color, and line and how they connect to one another and to human experience.
The non-ordinary reality reflected in Wong’s paintings show different environments inhabited by a range of animal spirits. We see cats and llamas, trees and swans, rainbows and even a man in the moon. These forms, which are highly personal to the artist yet open to the viewer’s interpretation, appear to be very much in flux, vacillating between legible representation and amorphous colors and shapes. Using acrylic and aqua-oil on canvas, Wong gives a material reality to her shamanistic visions, traversing a natural world that is both seen and unseen. The spirits in Wong’s work thread back, not only to Chinese ink wash painting, but also to early cave painting and to the stylized depictions of nature by the ancient Egyptians. The fluid strokes in Wong’s paintings on raw canvas or linen, are reminiscent of stains by Morris Lewis yet the history Wong aligns herself with is much more expansive than that of modern Western painting.
“I am interested in embodying the spirit realm through the paintings, treating the canvas itself as the skin and flesh of the beings, with their light seeping through— “Wong captures the ephemeral in lines and colors that appear bright and effortless yet\reflect a mastery of control. In her indelible marks, we see a vision that is as temporal as the flap of a butterfly wing and as expansive as the powers of the shaman.
Yuh-Shioh Wong (b. 1977 Taipei, Taiwan) obtained a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, an MFA in Painting from Hunter College in NYC, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2003. She was an Artist in Resident at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX in 2013, and is represented in San Francisco, CA by Anthony Meier Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely across the US and lives and works in Los Angeles.