Yiwei Gallery is pleased to present the American debut exhibition of Oakland-based Chinese artist Zhang Mengjiao. This exhibition includes two latest photography series from Zhang, Flat Power, and We Don’t Speak the Same Language, along with a unique sound installation.

Investigating how beauty was portrayed in traditional Chinese archives, and how it is conceived in Chinese social media today because of globalization, Zhang realizes that the gaze and constraint on women have remained the same. In Flat Power, Zhang makes masks from materials that represent the idea of beauty and transforms this performance into a 2D photograph. By presenting beauty as a constructed idea, she asks the question of how one can subvert the dominant discourse.

Brought back to a zoo by her childhood nostalgia, Zhang did not feel the same about these idealized human-constructed habitats for animals anymore. In We Don’t Speak the Same Language, Zhang turns the lens to the artificial landscapes in a zoo and explores deeper how artifice emerges from a photographic process.

Zhang Mengjiao received her MFA degree from San Francisco Art Institute in 2020. She works with photography, sculptural installation, and performance video. Zhang’s practice often looks inward at her own identity as a woman of color, Chinese immigrant, artist, and human, and outward at social issues.

Yiwei Gallery Presents
For the Sake of…the Artifice!
June 18 - July 3, 2021

Curated by Yiwei Lu

Kylin Gallery
8634 Wilshire Blvd,
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

To make an appointment, visit here
For inquiries, please contact YiweiGallery@gmail.com

Willian Catling, Navigating the Deep Pelagic Courtesy of The Progress Gallery — Willian Catling, Navigating the Deep Pelagic
Courtesy of The Progress Gallery

The Progress Gallery, Pomona is pleased to present Navigating the Deep Pelagic, a solo exhibition of the Los Angeles County-based artist-sculptor William Catling. This is his first solo show at the gallery.

Opening reception: on Saturday, April 10- from 6-8pm. The artist will be present.

The body of work explores how the horizontal and vertical interact; as they relate to birth and death, the spiritual and the physical, water and vapor, matter and spirit. The boat forms hover in the horizontal liminal spacebetween the fluidity of liquid and the intangibility of air; functioning as a kind of container for the human spirit. These forms reflect the interior space humans occupy at the soul level, the deepest part of the self. The works exist as a way of seeing in association with the power of memory, suffering and hope. The boat forms and the nests are symbolic of an internal journey, of silent prayer, of transitional spaces; quietly impacting the area around them or the viewer who comes close. The usage of clay reinforces a connection to the earth and the way we are rooted to the land while the vessel forms create a way of navigating deep waters. As a whole, the work creates a type of mapping where there are no landmarks, no place to anchor, and no way to know the way, without an upward gaze into the heavens.

Read more here

INFORMATION

The Progress Gallery
300 S. Thomas Street Suite B Pomona, CA 91766 (Elevator Access Available)
April 8, 2021 to April 30, 2021

Artist Talk
April 17, 2021 7
7P - 8:30P