be water my friend: Los Angeles
Under (AAPI) Heritage Month, Yiwei Gallery is pleased to present be water, my friend ，a group exhibition featuring four Asian American artists, Daieny Chin, Michael Thế Khôi Trần, Kristen Liu-Wong, and Justin Yoon. The exhibition showcases their works on canvas, collectively speaking to their personal memories of identities that reflect autoethnographic narratives of the Asian diaspora.
Originally a quote from Bruce Lee’s philosophy, 'be water, my friend' borrows Lee’s idea of the formless nature of water, which takes the shape of anything it enters. While it is a philosophy about adapting, the exhibition brings out an alternative side of the thinking framework, under which we delineate the containers by reading the shape of water: What makes them make what they have made?
Four artists present figurative paintings. Each varies from surrealistic and metaphorical approaches, intertwining mythical references, dreamspace, and urban settings.
Daieny Chin
Daieny Chin is a Korean-American artist who was born in 1994 in São Paulo, Brazil. They graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in 2018 with a BFA in painting. Daieny currently resides in Los Angeles, California, and continues to create introspective works that bridge the gaps of identity, culture, personal narratives, and human connection within the Korean diaspora. Incorporating the themes of Korean culture, shamanism, mythology, intergenerational trauma, and the representation of matriarchs within their family, their paintings explore the power dynamics, resilience, and the emotional terrain of their experiences. Through the use of shamanism and Korean mythology, Daieny links the connections between myth, spirituality, and reality. This allows them to create fantastical narratives that reflect both personal and collective experiences of the Korean diaspora, while illuminating the complexities of identity and heritage.
Kristen Liu-Wong
Born and raised in San Francisco and based in Los Angeles, Kristen Liu-Wong attended Pratt Institute where she graduated with a BFA in Illustration. Kristen’s work blends everyday occurrences from her life with abstracted nightmares and crude humor. Trained as an illustrator, she tries to tell a story with every piece she makes, developing a personal and slightly sinister narrative within each painting. Using vibrant colors, heavy patterning, and tight compositions, the work draws inspiration from a variety of sources including but not limited to American folk art, the cartoons she watched as a kid, Shunga, and her appreciation for architecture. She strives to make work that is highly personal but altered enough to allow individual interpretations of every story she paints.
Justin Yoon
Justin Yoon (b. 1991, Los Angeles, California) is a Brooklyn based painter. Justin holds a B.F.A in Illustration from Parsons School for Design, NY. Early childhood memories of American junk food, late night old Hollywood movies on the TV, and listening to jazz in the car with his family on long drives significantly affected him to create a world of romantic melancholia, synthetic colors, and casual lostness of being. With no specific emotions provoked, the group of characters reoccur over and over in a deeply synthetic yet ambiguous dream-like landscape, continuing on this never ending "Highschool Reunion". The viewer becomes a part of this experience, which is vaguely both universal yet deeply personal.
Michael Thế Khôi Trần
Michael Thế Khôi Trần (b.1997, Ox) is an interdisciplinary artist who resides in Los Angeles/Orange County. He received his BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. Tran’s work explores his Vietnamese asexual identity introspectively in the setting of a playground. Tran references the iconography of an ox as a self-portrait of a misunderstood self; helpless and ensnared in his playground. Tran collages layers of patterns and repetition in his work to manipulate the spaces within the subject and the background to force tension and vibration. The repeating patterns stem from a vicious cycle where one has to break out, or surrender to the fear.
About the Curator
Kaizhou Allegro Yang is a producer and an art curator based Los Angeles. He holds a bachelor of Arts from University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Currently working in Yiwei gallery as an assistant curator, he has participated in many curation plans of the gallery exhibitions. He curated a pop-up exhibition Cry, Baby, Cry last year in Yiwei Gallery.
Kaizhou has strong interests in films and art that represent political agendas, and those that concern subjects of diaspora and post-colonialism.
