✧Slow Hand Movements✧ * Gentle Whispers * Water * Salt * Tingles *

Amanda Bowles, Greg Carideo, Jes Fan, Gordon Hall, Maryam Jafri, Liao Guohe, Oren Pinhassi, Trevor Shimizu, Zhang Peili

Curated by Frederick Cruz Nowell for Passing Fancy

Boers-Li Gallery New York is delighted to present ✧Slow Hand Movements✧ * Gentle Whispers * Water * Salt * Tingles *. Taking the online world of ASMR videos as a reference, this group exhibition presents works by artists that foreground the instrumentality of touch in the phenomenological experience of the lived body, especially bodies that requisitely and recreationally navigate physical and virtual spaces.

In the ASMR genre, creators upload self-produced videos of themselves doing what would typically be considered outrageously mundane tasks - such as tapping on books, whispering instructions, crinkling cellophane wrappers, and so on - in order to conjure “sounds that feel good”. To produce these affective moments, which can “trigger” sensations of aroused relaxation, everyday objects are made devoid of their customary functions, and are repurposed to perform audio-visually in ways that exude tactility, timbre, and intimate proximity.

There is an inherent queerness in this pursuit of pleasurable sensations. Listening to objects as a means of self-touch untethers our practical and productive connections to them, redirecting the flow of experience. This remediation eschews normative conventions, and proposes an alternate way to communicate and experience the sensuality of objects. The phenomenon of ASMR also points to larger issues about the negotiations of desire and materiality through digitally-mediated means [such as fingers and numerical data], and this exhibition presents work that re-attends to the materiality of objects and gestures in order to compel new orientations to thingness, systems, pattern, song, self-care, pleasure, and arousal.

Amanda Bowles is an interdisciplinary artist who works across time and space, occupying territory between the virtual and physical. Experimenting with temporality, she utilizes material-specific processes to express a yearning for deep-time. Her practice demarcates the studio as site for transformation and transmission, where the environment of production functions as backdrop for performances that are staged for image-capture. Amanda Bowles was Born in 1979 in Alexandria, VA. She received her MFA from Northwestern University and her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She is a founding member and co-owner of Monaco, an artist-run gallery in St. Louis, Missouri. And has an on-going painting practice, bigweirdo with artist Howard Krohn. Bowles currently works and lives in St. Louis, MO.

Greg Carideo was born and raised in Minneapolis, MN. He earned a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) in 2008 and an MFA from NYU Steinhardt in 2015. He currently lives and works in New York City, and is an Adjunct Professor at NYU. Select exhibitions include ‘Sexting,’ Kate Werble Gallery NY, NY (2016); ‘Everything at Once,’ Antenna, New Orleans LA (2012); and ‘Objectophilia: Biennial of Americas,’ Denver, CO (2010). Grants and fellowships include the VanDerlip Travel Grant (2008); MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Mentorship (2008); Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2008); Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2010/11), and a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015).

Jes Fan is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong, China. He is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, Jerome Artist Fellowship, Recess Art Residency, Bemis Center Residency, Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, Pioneer Works Residency and John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally; selected exhibitions include Mother is a Woman at Empty Gallery (Hong Kong), Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery (London/UK), An Opera for Animals at Rockbund Museum (Shanghai/CN), In Search of Miss Ruthless, Para Site, (Hong Kong), Paradox: Haptic Body in the Age of AI at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh/US), Disposed to Add at Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia/US). Fan's work has been reviewed and featured by Artforum, Hyperallergic, AsiaArtPacific, Bomb magazine, Frieze magazine, Mousse Magazine.

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York. Hall's sculptures and performances have been exhibited at MIT List Center for Visual Arts, Sculpture Center, The Renaissance Society, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Movement Research, EMPAC, Art in General, Temple Contemporary, Foxy Production, Hessel Museum at Bard College, White Columns, Wysing Arts Centre, Abrons Arts Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Drawing Center, and Chapter NY, among others. Hall was awarded a LMCC Process Space Residency, a Triangle Arts Foundation Residency, the LMCC Workspace Residency, an Edward F. Albee Foundation residency, Production and Presentation Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Acre, and the Fire Island Artist Residency. Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College.

Maryam Jafri

Known for fictitious, irreverent, and often satirical strategies of making perverse, bold and even offensive images, Liao Guohe draws into his paintings an array of subject matters among which ‘justice’ emerges as a central theme. Lately, Liao focuses particularly on the macroscopic issues of politics and society. The ways in which his paintings challenge the threshold of moral and ethical values lie in his tour de force of visual representation, which combines western painting technique and the literati tradition of Chinese ink painting. Liao Guohe has become increasingly keen on playing with the subtlety and discrepancy between the written word and the other visual components of the painting - a primary methodological approach in his artistic conception. Liao Guohe was born in 1971 in Changsha, China. He has recently relocated his studio to Beijing. His works were the subject of solo exhibitions at Beijing Minsheng Art Museum in 2016 and Sifang Art Museum in 2014. He has participated in group shows including, Drawing Pogo at Taikang Space (2017), Le Grand Balcon: La Biennale de Montreal at the Musée Contemporaine de Montreal, Canada (2016); A Hundred Years of Shame - Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015). His works are in public and private collection worldwide including the Minsheng Museum, Uli Sigg collection, and White Rabbit collection.

Oren Pinhassi’s large plaster and glass sculptures reference the architecture of queer sites where the private and public intersect. Through a blur of boundaries between humans and objects, the sculptures, corporeal and rough, invite viewers into a sensual landscape where bodies are simultaneously hidden and exposed. Pinhassi’s work imagines the political potential of the erotic as a poetic, yet architectural logic for the construction of objects and spaces. Oren Pinhassi graduated from the Yale School of Art in 2014. Recent solo shows include Second Nature at Edel Assanti, London, 2018; One in the mouth and one in the heart at Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, 2018; Nature Calls at Ribot Gallery, Milan 2017, and Springs at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel, 2017. His work was featured in numerous group shows including Four at Yossi Milo Gallery, 2019; This Is Not A Prop, David Zwirner Gallery, 2018; A Scratch In Time, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, 2018 and more. Residencies include Palazzo Monti, Brescia, 2019, Outset Contemporary Art Fund’s Bialik Residency, 2017, the Shandanken Project at Storm King Sculpture Park, New York, 2016, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 2014. Pinhassi has been awarded numerous prizes including Pollock-Krasner grant, 2019; Fannie B. Pardee Prize, Yale School of Art, 2014; The Art Slant Prize, 2014, and the Shlomo Witkin Prize, 2011. Pinhassi lives and works in New York City.

Trevor Shimizu has produced a large body of paintings that are crudely gestural and sparse, and subtle in their compositional aesthetics if not in their subject matter. In works that are semi-autobiographical, humiliating social incidents and aberrations usually kept private are made public. Alongside his painting practice, Shimizu has produced a body of video art that emphasizes how his personal and public identities have been shaped by home video and the banality of television and media consumerism. Trevor Shimizu was born in 1978. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich, Germany; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Japan; The Vanity East, Los Angeles, CA; and 47 Canal, New York, NY. He has had group exhibitions at Brennan & Griffin, New York; Kodomo, Queens, NY; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Pilar Corrias, London, UK; Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg; Centre for Style, Melbourne, Australia; Nicolas Krupp, Basel, Switzerland; four81, New York, NY; 3A Gallery, New York, NY; Michael Thibault Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Jancar Jones Gallery, LA, California; Carriage Trade, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY; Weltraum 26, Munich, Germany; Guild & Greyshkul, New York, NY; and Canada, New York, NY. Shimizu participated in the Whitney Biennial in 2014. His work is part of the public collection of High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Shimizu lives and works in Long Island City, NY.

Zhang Peili emphasizes the concern and invention for real life through art, as well as the judgement of artistic language and self-criticism. He mainly works with multiple media including video, text, sound installation, mechanical installation and photography. Zhang graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in 1984, where he is currently the head of New Media Department. Zhang has held solo exhibitions at renowned institutions such as Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Modern Art New York, and he participated in Venice Biennale three times. He participated in several important international exhibitions such as Lyon Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Gwangju Biennale and Shanghai Biennale. His works have been collected by prominent institutions such as MoMA New York, Tate Modern , Guggenheim Museum New York, Guggenheim Museum Abu Dhabi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Art Institute of Chicago, Asia Society New York, Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery Australia, M+ Hong Kong, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai), Daimler Art Collection, DSL Collection, K11 Foundation (Hong Kong) and Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing). Zhang received the ACC annual artist award and CCAA lifetime achievement award. Born in 1957, Hangzhou, China, Zhang Peili currently lives and works in Hangzhou.