Momentos-Captured Memories

Ning Fang

Gina Hong

Weiyi Quan

Yesiyu Zhao

Biggercode Gallery is please to present Momentos-Captured Memories, an experimental group exhibition. All artists are SVA (School of Visual Arts) students and graduates, who represent the New York art scene in four different categories: painting, sculpture, design and lightening. These young artists have created works that act like a refreshment in the industry. Their creations focus on the currently matters and self-recognition, instead of ideas that have been explored by many predecessors.

Are dreams real or unreal? Sometimes I can’t tell.

Freud said that dreams are constructed of two parts. The past and the present.

Ning Fang is a New York based painter, who also explores ceramics. In Ning's works, most of the subjects are from her vivid dreams. She has always questioned the relationship between human beings, human with nature and space. Her dreams are very realistic and whimsical, they are like the conduit of her creativity. The characters, symbols, colors become her metaphor for feelings. Ning was born and grew up in Hangzhou, China. At age of seventeen, she and her family moved to Vancouver Canada. In year of 2013, she moved to New York to study at School of visual arts and graduated with BFA in Fine arts in 2017. After graduation, she continue to approach more unfamiliar mediums and techniques to develop my ideas into a fuller body of work while maintaining a raw quality. Such as painting on wood panels, mixing acrylic paint with clay, printmaking and book making.

Gina Hong was born and raised in South Korea and currently attends SVA (School of Visual Arts). Growing up surrounded by various influences and inspirations of art, Gina was enlighten by a Yayoi Kusama exhibition in 2003, and it was Kusama’s famous “millions of dots”. Whilst this fascination, she developed a condition called “typophobia’, which is a phobia of irregular pattern or clusters of small holes or bumps. This condition traumatically affected her in everyday life. Continuously influenced by Kusama’s other works, Gina was inspired by Kusama’s courage and decided on this project to overcome her phobia. She debated in presenting her forte but have decided on an installation so that she can push herself to another by transforming her fear into a creative energy to sculpt this artwork of irregular, repeating holes, circles and even surfaces. She specifically chose this color to magnify and accentuate the irregularity and to make it even more horrifying to us, to her. White symbolizes innocence, purity, security and cleanliness. It also can sooth, calm and give a sense of tranquility. A mush as it horrifies her as well as challenging, she has tried to deliver her fear into a physical form so that the audience can experience it as well.

WeiYi Quan is a New York-based illustrator and designer who is originally from China. He attended the School of Visual Arts and graduated with Bachelor of Fine Art degree in Illustration in 2017.Weiyi grew up in a big city Shanghai, most of his illustrations were fascinated by the cultural background of his hometown. His artwork is full of fantasy characters and patterns, which are intended to resonate with people’s memory and cultural perspective. His work was featured in Vogue Russia, BuzzFeed and ElleMen.

Yesiyu Zhao questions "Where is home?". Wars, terrorists, discrimination, refugee crisis... With all the craziness happening, the idea of home become questionable. “Where is the world that we live in?” By using collage and layers as a working metaphor for multiplicity and diversity, he dissects figures and reinvent them into hybrid monsters that are inspired from both Chinese mythology and Western modern daily living. On the other hand, by cooperating light boxes with double-side paintings, he captures utopian coexistence of distinct characteristics through brush strokes and transparency that embodies accents of both Western abstract expressionist, Chinese watercolor paintings and calligraphy. “A heterogeneous mixture starts to happen, not uniform yet perfectly fine. I am not home but proudly residing here. In a world that is so globalized, borders of cultures start to blur and individuals start to become more complexed. Ultimately, by portraying a few characters as reflecting examples, I want to explore fine lines of tension between globalization and singularity in those who feel abandoned or lost.” Yesiyu currently studies at SVA (School of Visual Arts) in New York.