Polin Huang & Jingqi Wang
December 7, 2023 – January 6, 2024
Waking Life paired Jingqi Wang’s surrealist still lifes with Polin Huang’s bold, glitter-flecked feminine portraits, meeting at the threshold between dreaming and waking.
Polin Huang & Jingqi Wang: Waking Life at VillageOneArt offered a transcendental perspective of the interstitial: moments frozen between different cultures, geographic locations, or states of consciousness. The subjectivity of experience and our ability as people to shift mindsets, similar to what occurs in the transition between dreamstates and waking life, was explored in the artists’ playful representational paintings. Through bold color blocks, strong use of line, and an embrace of decorative patterning, the artists threaded myth, memory, and dream-like visions into scenes that formed marked departures from everyday life. From still-life compositions by Wang to Huang’s bold, playful feminine portraits, Waking Life offered the viewer the chance to explore adventures at the boundaries and borders of what they believed to be possible.
Hinting around the edges of iconographies found in works by Marc Chagall and Dorothea Tanning, Jingqi Wang referenced Albert Camus’ Sisyphean notion of absurdity in surrealist-inspired fantasy paintings representing a melange of pattern, still life, and reverie. Mounting a humorous yet, at times, sobering approach to contemporary reality, Wang played with narration in compositional elements such as pattern and surface texture in works such as “Skirt Mountain” and “Ulysses” (above). Huang, meanwhile, embraced mixed-media elements such as glitter, acrylic, and oil pastel in her compositions, presenting flat approaches to painting and portraiture. She played with tropes entangled with social mores regarding female sexuality in her humorous yet incisive paintings. Utilizing techniques such as pastiche and kitsch, Huang’s utilization of a flat picture plane brought a sense of otherworldliness and fantasy to her informed compositions. Waking Life enticed the viewer to embrace dreamscapes as a path to the absurd.
Founded in 2018, VillageOneArt is a women-led contemporary art space founded by gallerist Vivienne Yang and curator Christy Qin in the neighborhood of Chelsea, NYC, showcasing works from local and international artists of diverse backgrounds. The gallery’s foundational principles are established upon exploring the infinite bounds of human imagination through expansive and innovative mediums. VillageOneArt Gallery serves as a necessary bridge between art and the public sphere, with a soul reflecting the evolving spirit of our era. Each exhibition sparks a temporal and cultural dialogue, inviting rich reflection and thought-provoking perspectives.
Works in the Exhibition
Waking Life was on view at VillageOneArt, 150 West 25th Street, Suite 403, New York, from December 7, 2023 to January 6, 2024. For inquiries regarding available works by Polin Huang and Jingqi Wang, please contact info@villageoneart.com.