Christine Wang

Magenta Plains is pleased to present Twilight by San Francisco-based painter, Christine Wang.

Twilight is the second work from of an eight painting cycle entitled White People produced between November 2017 to May 2018. The series features portraits of young Hollywood starlets, two men accused of sexual violence towards women, and a young Prince celebrated for his interracial marriage. The repeated slogans laid atop the paintings: “I just want to be a white girl”; “I wish I was a white man”; “I wish I were a white man”; and “I just wanted to be a white girl,” directly refer to race, desire, gender inequality, and the complex constructions of identity in the 21st century.

Twilight re-appropriates a cropped image of Robert Pattison’s lips in an attempt to kiss a young Kristen Stewart, who gazes back longingly at the viewer. Her face, painted roughly seven times larger than life, gives a sense of a cultural phenomena that is beyond the corporeal. These celebrity portraits, intricately rendered and overlaid with ironic texts, offer an absurdist critique on the many levels of hypocrisy and injustice within popular culture. The works can be read as documents of a historical moment of reckoning, conveyed with equal parts humor, rage and sarcasm.

Christine Wang (b. 1985 Washington, DC) received her M.F.A. from the University of California in Los Angeles in 2013 and her B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 2008. Wang has presented solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Reiseburogalerie, Cologne, DE; and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, DE; as well as recent two-person and group shows at M. LeBlanc Gallery, Chicago, IL; Et Al., San Francisco, CA; and LAXART, Los Angeles, CA. She has been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and Chashama North. In 2017, she was nominated for the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize. Wang lives and works in San Francisco, CA.