KIKI XUEBING WANG
Lapwings
Artist Reception: November 17th, 6-8 PM
November 18th - December 17th, 2022
Click HERE for a PDF
The similarity between the paintings of Kiki Wang and the late bon vivant Gerald Murphy are striking. While his style veered toward the Art Deco tendencies of his era, both painters maintain a fascination with the mechanical - say, the inner workings of watches - and that curiosity spills over into other illuminations of fashion or creatures found in nature be it a buzzing wasp or - in her case - the rarest of moths, a Deilephila.
Of the exhibition title, Lapwings is a breed of birds mostly seen in the United Kingdom, where Kiki Wang currently resides. “The paintings depict dance dresses in motion and the form of each painting has some type of wing in it,” explains the artist. "Lapwings, as a title, then, implies frequent motion. I hoped to incorporate the volume of a wing in the painting, its folding, unfolding; the dancer modulating like a bird between stasis and flight.”
The sensation of motion - that feeling of activation - is a foundational element here (in works such as On My Volcano Grows the Grass) but just as abundant are opportunities for the anthropomorphic. A crease in a dress reads as a protruding thumb in Sound of The Phoenix Tree. Elsewhere two pink dots in one painting can be identified as alert nipples or as crystals embellishing a garment.
“Cropping in my paintings is like zooming in and out in films,” says Wang. “Just like the movement of a lense focusing on detail and then the whole scene, I hope my work has the effect of moving the audiences' eyes around when they look at each painting.”
