Yosub Koh & Angela Fang Zirbes

Latitude Gallery is pleased to present Me & My Plurals, a two-artist show bringing together the figure paintings of Yosub Koh and Angela Fang Zirbes, whose works enters a conversation that challenges the conventional approaches to figures and identity.

"How would you describe a person?"

You may define your relationship with them, come up with several adjectives to outline their personality, or bring up some stories to support your impressions of them. Describing a person takes several steps, just like painting a figure. Starting from sketching out a contour, the artist wants to flourish the canvas with dots, lines, and shapes. These also take time, and a lot could happen when one flourishes a figure. Personal relationships might be reconsidered, adjectives that outline a personality might be consolidated or challenged, and stories of the person’s past might be rediscovered.

A figure is never just a face. Never just a nose, a mouth, two ears, two eyes, and two eyebrows within an oval. A figure is a person’s plural: multiple static images, multiple persons at different times of the past, multiple connections with others and the surroundings, and multiple brushstrokes infused with the artist’s emotions and memories.

While her previous works focus on the theme of fear and privacy in domestic scenes, Angela Fang Zirbes's recent group of works walks outside of the house with curiosity and interacts with subject matters that are key to shaping and negotiating her identity. In black and white colors, the artist paints the rural scenes in her hometown in Iowa where she is currently based, and merges her mother’s Chinese background into portraying her body. In her tranquil and surreal storytellings, her hair becomes the field, her face becomes the flowers, and her body becomes an active site for the exchange of nature, biographical history, and emotions.

Yosub Koh’s paintings bring the conventional figure paintings into question. While most figure paintings present a momentary and static view of a person, Koh’s figures exist in a duration of time that appear in front of the audience as a moving and changing plurality of figures. He experiments with the Korean traditional hanji paper, which becomes translucent after applied with gel. Benefited by this material quality, the artist aligns several sheets of paper each painted with a different figure of a person, and the figures are able to merge into one as the lower layers appear in the upper ones. While the individual figure captures the person at a moment, the layering brings a more vivid person to the audience.

In Koh and Fang Zirbes’s paintings, we can see a shared interest in expanding the painting medium’s magic of conveying a plural of messages through graphic language. In doing so, they push figure painting to a frontier that overcomes its impossibility to carry a figure’s plurality within a single frame. By appreciating their paintings, we rediscover the joy to always be curious about others and think about others as a true path toward preserving each other’s humanity in this rapidly digitizing world.

Angela Fang Zirbes (b. 2000, Iowa) is a painter whose work explores identity, isolation, and uncertainty through personal memories, recurring dreams, and found imagery. Drawing from her experience growing up as a biracial woman in the American Midwest, she creates uncanny domestic scenes that blur the boundaries between reality and memory, familiarity and unease.

Fang Zirbes received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2023. Her debut solo exhibition, House & Ghosts, was held at Hashimoto Contemporary, New York (2025). Selected group exhibitions include Seeing Double at Plan X Gallery, Milan (2025), and Main Character at Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong (2024). Her work has been presented at Future Fair, New York (2024), and Context Art Miami (2022, 2023). She was awarded the inaugural Future Fair Artist Prize in 2024 and participated in the Art For Change Artist-in-Residence Program in 2025.

Koh Yosub (b.1990, Seoul, Korea) Koh Yosub’s paintings reflect his own life. Rather than pursuing a fixed subject, he explores theunstable boundaries between people and their actions within a state of constant fluctuation, muchlike life itself. His work begins with fragments of personal experience and relationships, which he reconstructs, destroys, and fixes again through layered images rather than direct narration. He primarily works with Korean paper, watercolor, oil paint, and pastel. He repeatedly draws images on thin sheets of Korean paper, then layers and transfers them onto canvas or wood. Through this process, he creates translucent figures whose forms appear and disappear within the painted surface. The figure thus becomes not a fixed subject, but an image that continually shifts through memory and perception.