Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian, an ambitious survey exhibition featuring the work of nearly fifty artists curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng.
Irrelevant wishes to highlight artists who are more American than Asian, based in New York, and embedded in an expansive community of emerging artists struggling to show and succeed in this cutthroat city. You will not find paintings about the Cultural Revolution or Mao Zedong that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will not find manga-infused characters performing acts of hypersexuality nor will you find decorative miniature drawings with motifs embedded within a specific cultural history.
What you’ll find is a surging flow of creativity where artists actively engage in their practice, exploring the absurd within everyday experience, the use and misuse of materials both new and found, and the curiosity of defining artistic practice. Food and consumption is considered within an urban agricultural environment, and social interaction is taken out of norm and reenacted in refreshing alternative ways. Pictured narratives gear toward a dark and isolated realm and obsession is the source behind abstracted images.
A major focus of this exhibition is to formulate a community, building a foundation for artists to gather and exchange ideas and experiences. There is an endless array of amazing underrepresented artists in NY, thriving yet unheard. Through this exhibition we get to see artists engaging with their given role and their interests within a particular medium, exploring on both conceptual and idealistic levels with painting, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. We get to see abstraction within the everyday and the everyday within abstraction. We get to see materials unfolded, manipulated, reworked and dysfunctioned. We get to feel self-conscious and hyper aware of our stance as viewers, where time and space is altered and questioned.
Irrelevant is a friendly and humorous, and somewhat ridiculous, rejection of a neurotic art market and its obsession with specifying artists to a particular culture and ethnicity. This exhibition purifies and de-labels the artist as Asian, by labeling the artist as Asian, to be shown inside a contemporary Asian art gallery.
Artists:
Seong Min Ahn, Shin Young An, Sophia Chai, Louis Chan, Karen Chan, Rona Chang, Gigi Chen, Yoon Cho, Micah Ganske, Hyoungsun Ha, Geujin Han, Takashi Horisaki, Jane V. Hsu, Hidenori Ishii, Hong Seon Jang, Kyoung Eun Kang, Heige Kim, Seung Ae Kim, Nancy Kim, Hein Koh, Shizuka Kusayanagi, Amy Fung-yi Lee & Caroline Jung-ah Park, JaeEun Lee, Sinae Lee, Soo Im Lee, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Pixy Liao, Juri Morioka, Tadashi Moriyama, Joel Morrison, Dominic Neitz, Christian Nguyen, Asuka Osawa, Eung Ho Park, Youngna Park, Jung Eun Park, R&D, Ruijun Shen, Satomi Shirai, Hidemi Takagi, Tattfoo Tan, Kikuko Tanaka, Jason Tomme, Mai Ueda, Kako Ueda, InJoo Whang, Mika Yokobori, Yejin Yoo, Jayoung Yoon, Seldon Yuan
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday 10-6pm and by appointment.
Arario Gallery
521 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
info@ararionewyork.com
