NYAB Event - "3x3" Exhibition

"3x3" Exhibition

Crossing Art

This event has ended.

3x 3 Phantom Landscape: Yang Yongliang / Uprooted: Hyungsub Shin/Havoc in Heaven: Eric Jiaju Lee

Crossing Art presents 3 x 3, an exhibition incorporating three installations by three artists working in three different mediums. 3 x 3 includes Phantom Landscapes: Yang Yongliang, Uprooted: Hyungsub Shin, and Havoc in Heaven: Eric Jiaju Lee. Each of the artists explores ideas concerned with the re-thinking of traditional Asian artistic concepts and practices using traditional and non-traditional materials that evoke questions about a changing and evolving Asia.

Yang Yongliang: Phantom Landscape
Using a camera and computer, Yang Yongliang’s work combines traditional Chinese painting styles with modern Shanghai city life to reveal haunting imaginary landscapes that critique China’s rapidly changing urban culture. Forbidden City reflects the increasing “prohibitive” signage that has invaded the urban landscapes of Shanghai and its impact on the population’s psychology and behavior. Captured in Misty City 1 is, what Yongliang explains, “culture... lost and confused into a mist among the conflicts between the east and west, modern and traditional culture.” From a distance, Yongliang’s photographs and videos mirror dreamlike Shanshui paintings. Upon closer inspection they depict modern city views; skyscrapers under construction, freeway systems, electrical power plants, and bustling urban corridors, where he has discovered harmony between contradictions; ephemeral and solid, vigor and gentle, sparse and bold, fragility and danger, beauty and cruelty.
Yang Yongliang, born in 1980, lives and works in Shanghai, China and studied traditional Chinese art such as shui mo painting and calligraphy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yang Yongliang is included in prestigious international collections including the British Museum, London, England and Bates College Museum of Art, Maine, US.

Hyungsub Shin: Uprooted
Hyungsub Shin’s work is motivated by the nature of artificiality where he searches for the place where nature and culture coincide. The subject matter of his abstract sculptures and paintings are realized in the forms of a rhizome, a thick underground horizontal stem that produces roots and has shoots that develop into new plants. The rhizomes symbolize life in continual flux, expansion by division and fragmentation, and identity as a social relationship.
Hyungsub Shin was born in Incheon, Korea. He received his BFA from Hong-Ik University, Seoul, Korea and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Shin has shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions internationally including Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, NY, Calvin & Morris and DEAN PROJECT. Hyungsub Shin currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Eric Jiaju Lee: Havoc in Heaven
The title, Havoc in Heaven, is derived from the earliest chapters of one of the three great Chinese epic novels, Journey to the West, written by Wu Cheng 'En in the sixteenth century which is believed to have been a criticism of China's political system and society. The epic recounts the many poignant and humorous adventures of the impetuous, all powerful Monkey King. The Monkey King also referred to as Sun Wukong has a bold, daring, and mischievous personality who rebels against the Jade Emperor of heaven in his pursuit to recapture the lost Buddhist scriptures from India. The paintings on view in Havoc in Heaven reflect the diversity of Lee’s surfaces, including silk, satin and linen, unveiling layers of satirical and playful meaning within the work referential to the Monkey King and his foibles. Silk, acknowledged as being discovered in China was first used to make clothing. Still today while browsing online you find colorful silk dresses, scarves and purses that use colorful silk adorned with gold and other colored designs. These adornments can be associated to what some might consider Chinese kitsch; a material, design and color scheme stereotypically associated with the exotic “Chinese” culture, sold to the west as such but not currently popular in modern mainstream Chinese culture and/or fashion. With the history of his material in mind Lee, using silk, confronts his audience by exploring the familiar “foreignness” of the surface although it is rooted and influenced by Lee’s background of Western Abstraction. The titles of the work reflect terms associated with game-playing; such as Double-up, What’s Not Between Either Or, and Valences of Ascendancy evoking questions of noble aims amidst displacement. By combining a historically Eastern produced material with Western abstraction techniques and styles Lee personifies a double-agent of sorts, intersecting traditional Chinese painting and materials with concepts of contemporary abstraction.
Lee has exhibited in numerous exhibitions locally and abroad and his works belong to diverse private and corporate collections. He is the recipient of a myriad of awards and residencies and has lectured at museums and institutions throughout New York. Lee is currently an adjunct professor of fine arts at Hunter College in New York.