Exhibitions

Curatorial Statement by Ray Hwang:

As a kid growing up in LA, family trips to Chinatown weren't too different than trips to an amusement park. They were colorful, adventurous, and sometimes even just slightly dangerous enough to be exciting. Roaming the stalls at the strip malls allowed my tiny, undeveloped child brain to wander and my favorite activity became looking at all the bootleg merch of my favorite cartoons. Everything was the wrong color, mirrored, distorted or manipulated in a way that brought sort of a playful, dark humor to the content it was displaying. The marriage between Diane’s and Ingrid’s work creates an environment where this feeling runs rampant. Like a playground structure, they’re colorful and intuitive to enter. But when approached from a different angle, portals emerge allowing entry into a world that can be simultaneously comforting yet unsettling in its design. Within Ingrid’s work, lines and forms stretch and compress, forcing your eyes to move all over as if you were looking at several different security monitors at the same time. Different parts of her paintings demand your attention one after another and you can’t help but notice the careful layering and attention to edges that create this effect. Diane’s work operates similarly, but instead of windows, the paintings feel like they wrap around your skull taking space within your peripheral vision. You can’t help but feel like you fell into them, maybe before you even realize. Together, the work violently bounces around and against each other. And while the bouncing has a certain aggressiveness, the work of each of these artists’ is ultimately and unintentionally lifted by their respective desires for attention.

Exhibited at Out of the Closet in Brooklyn, NY for Gowanus Artwalk 2020. (The store offers free HIV testing.) The video being shown on the projector is online here.

Crybaby’s World is an immersive installation using soft sculptures, found and custom textiles, oil paintings, and found objects. It unites a continuous body of work about Crybabies—characters whose faces are shaped like skincare sheet masks, but with protruding bunny ears and mushy bodies—and the world they inhabit. Informed by Sianne Ngai’s investigation of cuteness as a contradictory emotion that contains both affection and aggression, I embed soft domestic objects with disembodied tongues, lost teeth, and cartoony tears, creating a collision between sarcasm and sincerity. Through assembling romantic junk from China, America, and the internet, I re-interpret failures of cultural translation into new narratives of hybridity. Some structures and feelings can’t be translated, only violently manipulated to fit inside a different culture, creating something enticingly inauthentic.