ARE ALL THINGS EPHEMERAL?
KIWHA LEE
SUNYOUNG HWANG
AIDAN BARKER-HILL
NIANXIN LI
MONTI8 is thrilled to announce “Are All Things Ephemeral?”, a group exhibition which brings together the work of four artists coming from different geographycal areas and backgrounds: Kiwha Lee (South Korea, lives and works in New York), Sunyoung Hwang (South Korea, lives and works in London), Aidan Baker-Hill (Nevada, lives and works in New York) and Li Nianxin (China, lives and works in New York), all exhibiting for the first time in Italy. Each artist explores the notion of ephemerality and the complexity of the intangible, expressed by very different styles and subjects. Aidan Barker-Hill, for instance, focuses on the transience of life through the representation of everyday moments, creating scenes where often he depicts portraits of himself. Even when evoking feelings and emotions connected to these moments, like personal memories for example, he seems to be more interested in capturing a specific and unrepeteable scene. The present is what matters, what we see now matters.
In contrast with this approach, the other artists involved invite the viewer to look beyond what they see. For them, not all things are ephemeral or tangible: on the contrary, they reflect on issues such as traditions, identity, relationship between the innerself and nature, spirituality, emotions and how these themes can be made visible through their artistic practice. This opposition between two different visions creates a new dialogue built both on figurative and abstract paintings, characterized by the use of vibrant and vivid colours, sensual forms and layered textures.
Kiwha Lee
Vanitas, 2023
Oil and dye on canvas
54×40 inches / 137×101 cm
Kiwha Lee
Witness, 2024
Oil on canvas
24×18 inches / 61×20 cm
Kiwha Lee is a Korean-American painter based in New York City posing questions about what painting is in the 21st century. Exploring intersubjectivity between vision and the physical world, she reinvents various ancient Asian printmaking processes from craft traditions rooted in objects and architecture but with oil on canvas.
Complicating the reading of pictorial hierarchy by engaging pattern as a narrative tool, Lee establishes a new approach to abstraction with her “about face” alternative to easel painting’s “painting as window”. Her paintings resemble jaali—the ornamental, latticed screen that functioned as a window for centuries in the non-West. Patterned light pierce through from the back side of the painting, flooding rather the viewer’s space. Lee engages in deep art historical dialogue with the hegemony of male, European modernists like Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of the imaginary Orient.
Sunyoung Hwang
We Stayed on the Top Station, 2023
Oil and acrylic on canvas
54×46 inches / 137,5×117,5 cm
Hwang specialises in large-scale abstract paintings and has a process-led approach to her work. She enjoys finding coherence and balance between the order and disarray of this approach, resulting in organised chaos. Hwang’s colour palette is similarly spontaneous, with each painting’s colours being instinctively selected. The inspiration for her work is drawn from physical, sensory, emotional, and psychological experiences.
Aidan Barker-Hill
Sore Muscles, 2022
Oil and acrylic on canvas
52×30 inches / 132×76 cm
Aidan Barker-Hill
The Tennis Player, 2024
Oil and acrylic on canvas
42×24 inches / 106×61 cm
“My recent paintings explore masculinity, romance, and how they interact with each other. Growing up in Reno, Nevada (not exactly a progressive bastion in the 90s) I felt a strong social pressure to behave and present in a way that didn’t feel authentic to me and it’s taken a long time to feel comfortable with who I am. It’s ok to cry, it’s ok to wear pink, it’s ok not to have some absolute rigid definition of what I find attractive and what my relationships look like. The paintings serve as an affirmation that it’s ok to be the kind of man I am. I want to make work that a teenage version of myself could see and feel emboldened to accept himself. A lot of the culturally toxic tropes about masculinity apply specifically to hetero relationships and how men should interact with women, so the recent work is traversing how to conduct a partnership in the modern day.
The paintings have an erotic undertone, but I focus less on sexuality and more on the vulnerability of a man’s willingness to be sensitive. I want the paintings to ideally communicate a kind of relationship in which men and women can be emotionally open in a healthy, happy way, but a lot of the work reflects the difficulty of forging this kind of relationship. I’m embracing my own feelings but also fighting against some ugly tendencies that I feel culture has bred into me as a man.”
Aidan Barker-Hill
Nianxin Li
Under the Pink Light, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
60×30 inches / 152×76 cm
Nianxin Li
Missing Mint Candy, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
24×48 inches / 61×122 cm
Li subverts the traditional still-life genre by populating her compositions with atypical elements. There is tension in the steady plane; the objects rely on and guard against one another. Each creature shoulders different responsibilities and ignores itself. They twist and squeeze carefully to maintain balance, but behind the balance is the sinking ground, the bubble about to burst, and the life that is ignored. Though her images are streamlined, they are not simplified: multiple visual centers compete in her paintings, bright, toxic colors and neutral tones contend with one another, and various paints (such as oil, spray, and acrylic) overlap. Such visual effects create a sense of division and confrontation, but with mutual checks and balances.
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