Unveil Gallery's inaugural exhibition, Displacement and Belonging, marks its recent emergence in Orange County's commercial gallery scene. Led by two women with art backgrounds, Unveil Gallery showcases artists from diverse backgrounds and "aims to nurture resonance, inspire meaningful dialogue, and extend artistic exploration beyond boundaries." For their debut exhibition, they selected works by four up-and-coming women artists, Shuling Guo, Bing Liu, LaRissa Rogers, and Fei Xue, whose courage and determination to explore the unfamiliar and transcend physical, emotional, and geographical boundaries have propelled them to make powerful and engaging art.
Guo, Liu, and Xue were born in China. Rogers is of African American and Korean descent and was raised in Virginia, United States. While Liu lives and works in Beijing and Xue in Shanghai, Guo emigrated to the US and settled on the East Coast. Rogers, the youngest of the four artists, recently graduated from a local MFA program and currently resides and works in Los Angeles. Their curiosity—searching beyond the familiar to find what stirs their minds and hearts—has driven them to explore new places and ideas within their home countries and abroad and shapes their identities as both women and artists. They have drawn inspiration from their surroundings to develop successful practices in various art forms, including painting, installation, sculpture, and drawing.
Bing Liu has traveled far. She first set foot in Africa to visit a relative living in Tanzania. Everything she saw and encountered during this time fascinated her because it differed from what she knew in China. She thought it magical. Stereotypes melted away as it began to feel familiar. She liked the peacefulness that surrounded her and found the lifestyle modern. She was taken by the beautiful scenery and enjoyed meeting the people. She was impressed by how many enjoyed life under less-than-fortunate circumstances and how different their lives were from hers. Liu learned there were other ways to live. She was profoundly affected by her experience and returned to Africa again, choosing other destinations. She observed and sketched, gathering visual memories. Liu took countless photographs, and her sketchbook was filled with notations and drawings she referred to upon returning home. Spring (2022) and The Cat's Eye Autumn Camellia (2023) were painted soon after two of her trips and are considered by Liu to be more reminiscences than literal references.
When looking at Liu’s work, the figures represented do not appear Chinese, and the vegetation, objects, and even the animals depicted could seem out of place, given knowledge of her cultural background. In Spring, the young people’s faces, with their absent eyes and soft features, appear to float in an ocean of flowers, detached and impervious to anything external. Despite their proximity to one another amid a suffocating sea of flowers in a dense composition, they seem content to coexist, each lost in thought. This attitude is made more evident by the figure of a young boy holding a book with one hand while the other is raised over his head in a gesture of reverie. Is he thinking or daydreaming? Liu does not give answers, but she has spoken about the detachment she initially experienced while traveling in Africa, “The world you enter has no real connection to you and is entirely unfamiliar…. It is full of things you can’t imagine.” Her figures express that detachment. Although her disconnectedness has given way to a deeper understanding of life because of her repeated visits, she has become more reflective, learning to control her emotions. The distance that separated her from the new and unfamiliar has narrowed. Liu distances herself from China to free her art from cultural constraints, allowing her to paint based on her experiences in a different culture.
When Shuling Guo moved to the United States almost five years ago, she embraced the unfamiliar and adjusted to it until it felt like a part of herself. She currently divides her time between the family's home in Philadelphia and their boat, Selkie, embracing her husband's love for the open sea in a nomadic lifestyle. Repurposing one of the boat's bedrooms as a studio and working around her one-year-old daughter's schedule, Guo takes notes and sketches to prepare for the paintings and drawings she will make during mooring intervals at islands and marinas. She acknowledges that the cyclical rhythm of time amidst the vastness of the sea and recent motherhood has greatly influenced her. She has become a keen observer of nature, her body, and its natural changes, leading her to see the world from a fresh perspective.
A graduate of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Guo received intense training in still life and Socialist realism. Gradually, her paintings have evolved from realistic depictions of nature to soft, organic abstractions. Her drawings Every Flower That Opens Its Sweet Eye #1, #2, #3, and #4 (2023) feature muted colors and rounded shapes, evoking idyllic landscapes. William Blake's Poetical Sketches inspired them, especially the "To the Evening Star" poem and its line about flower buds closing at dusk: "every flower that shuts its sweet eyes." "The personification of the flower was so vivid," said Guo, inspiring the opposite sentiment in her—"every flower that opens its sweet eyes." The drawings were created shortly after Guo's first childbirth to reflect the contrasting emotions she felt, the simultaneous physical distress and joy of motherhood.
Guo finds a growing creative kinship in her love of nature with American artist Agnes Pelton, a Symbolist painter whose art reflects a heightened state of awareness achieved through meditation. Similar to Pelton, she finds inspiration in spirituality and imagination. However, Guo's work sometimes features images of the night sky, sunsets, dawns, and other natural phenomena, adding an objective layer to her complex abstractions that aligns with her current mindset and lifestyle.
In Fei Xue's paintings, whimsical characters live harmoniously in imaginary worlds. Based on Chinese folktales, Xue has developed an inexhaustible visual language to create compelling narratives that captivate viewers. One vignette portrays creatures flying across the sky and riding a giant turtle while snail-like beings with large ears and limbs sit or stand quietly. In another, they appear distraught and involved in an agitated exchange. The surreal scene could be comic were it not for their wide-eyed expressions and open mouths denoting palpable anxiety. Amid the chaos, two creatures cry while others stare at the viewers, frightened as if seeking help or an explanation. The narratives of these paintings are derived from the legend of Nine Immortal Lord Cave, a mysterious cavern located in China’s Fujian province. The story tells of a man who lived in the cave and possessed the power to see the past, present, and future of any visitors who sought refuge and fell asleep in the cave's cool darkness. Interpretation of Dream Mountain #8 and #9 may symbolize the dreams of cave visitors who fell asleep in the tale that first inspired the series. Dreams frequently appear in Xue's work, exemplified by other works like Secret (2021), a painting depicting a group of girls gathered around a bonfire. The eerie atmosphere of this event lends an ominous feel to the scene, with an underlying tension running through the pictorial narrative.
Xue’s practice sometimes departs from the material of folklore to explore more personal territory. During her stay in Fujian Province, Xue gathered a collection of tile fragments on which she painted odd creatures to represent people in brief stories that encapsulate her emotional experiences shaped by adversity. She named this collection Sweetwords (2021) and chose red to depict the contrasting emotions in the various narratives. Imbued with a symbolic essence transcending their physical materiality, these fragmented stories read like anecdotes with a didactic intention and universal appeal.
While some artists in the exhibition construct imagined narratives in their paintings, LaRissa Rogers is inspired by personal experiences from her upbringing as an African American and Korean in the United States. She employs a Black feminist and de-colonial perspective, as well as her understanding of anthropophagy, Chinoiserie, and ceramic history, to make sense of her family's complicated past. The daughter of a Korean mother and an African American father, Rogers has grappled with questions about identity her whole life. "What are you?" has echoed in her mind since childhood. At first, she used her knowledge of her Korean heritage's cultural significance in American society to be accepted by her peers. As an adult, Rogers says she has "confronted and accepted dispersal and fragmentation as part of...a new world order that reveals more fully [who] we are." She looks back to her mother's experience as a Korean orphan and adoption by an African American soldier stationed in Seoul during the Vietnam War, her mother's love of ceramics, especially those with traditional Asian patterns, the impact of racism and slavery on her African American father's legacy, and her upbringing in Charlottesville, Virginia, a city named after Queen Charlotte and with a history of segregation and Jim Crow laws. These scattered experiences and fragments combine like puzzle pieces to shape her identity as a woman and artist.
The 2023 installation Of Eaters and the Eaten, featured in Displacement and Belonging, showcases an oval table decorated with ceramic pieces. The table is set up to emphasize the artist's choice of materials, including ceramics, sugar, wood, and glass. This arrangement was inspired by the table settings from the 17th and 18th centuries, the European dominance in trade through colonial exploitation, and the European interest in Chinoiserie and Asian ceramics. Each piece carries a specific meaning. Rogers articulates that she is the table upon which all the objects rest. The handcrafted tableware evokes a sense of familiarity while also honoring her mother's Korean heritage. The refined white sugar used as grout between the broken white tiles and the melted brown sugar refers to her father's African American ancestry. Rogers's craft is ideal for expressing her ideas, illuminating controversial and taboo subjects, and evoking emotions and awareness. She uses a family dining table to illustrate our moral perspective based on a dark historical past.
The combination of fictional and factual narratives in Displacement and Belonging expose the artists' curiosity and drive to venture into uncharted territory, drawing inspiration from diverse sources and delving into their personal experiences to create interior worlds.
Alma Ruiz
Los Angeles, September 2023