Summer Snow: Joey Leung and Lawman
August 3 — 31, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 3, 2024 from 5-7pm
Gallery Hours: Weds - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, Room 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco
re.riddle is pleased to present Summer Snow, an exhibition of work by Joey Leung and Lawman. The opening reception is on Saturday, August 3rd from 5-7pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, Room 204. The exhibition runs through August 31, 2024.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
“Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself.” - David Whyte
In a time of overexposure, with too much, too often, and too soon, the concept of hiding can serve as a creative act offering a means of protection, freedom and self-preservation. Hiding grants the state of concealment, a space to withdraw from sight, to be and to go somewhere where one cannot be found. Hiding provides time for incubation as we ready ourselves towards future emergence.
Summer Snow, an exhibition featuring the works of Joey Leung and Lawman, explores the poetics of hiding and its personal and cultural manifestations. Joey Leung's intricate ink wash drawings play with the tension between concealment and revelation. Her fantastical compositions employ the subject’s gaze, pop-culture and traditional Chinese iconography to coyly reveal and visually obfuscate the body and attempts at a clear narrative. With tiny pops of bright red nail polish and flushed, soft pink rotund feet, the figures’ bodies are both accentuated by and hidden beneath thick folds of fabric depicting Asian mythical creatures. Joey’s subjects all share distinct formal characteristics: lithe forms, jet black hair, adolescent facial features with wide-set eyes, button noses and little bow lips. Their childlike appearance carries a disquieting charm, an eerie pall veiled by an outwardly innocent cuteness, stirring both curiosity and apprehension.
Critiquing the impact of colonialism, Lawman’s vivid paintings comment on Hong Kong’s complex cultural identity via the notions of hiding and emergence. Bringing to light that which was hidden or suppressed during colonial rule, political unrest, and censorship, Lawman uplifts the local hustle culture and resilient spirit of Hong Kong. Through the use of humor and satire, the artist spotlights 90’s Hong Kong pop-culture references by juxtaposing them with canonical imagery from Western art history, literature and film. Deliberately selecting a rudimentary, crude painting style to portray weighty art historical concepts such as the sublime and memento mori, he sets up a framework in which historically privileged narratives are veiled through ‘humble’ materiality and form.
In Summer Snow, the act of hiding is not merely about concealment, but about the essence of this gesture as a safeguard until the moment for emergence arrives. As such, the exhibition prompts us to reflect on hiding as a protective act, essential for sustenance and growth, akin to the bud of a summer bloom hidden beneath the snow.
Artworks
click on images for more detail
