PLATO

Participating artists: Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Sebastian Ore Blas, Adam de Boer, Peter Hong Tsun Chan, Henry Hung Chang, Sylvia Trotter Ewens, Christina Lucia Giuffrida, Yifan Jiang, Darina Karpov, Kwesi O. Kwarteng, Azadeh Nia, Shuto Okayasu, Benny Or, Diana Sinclair, Tang Shuo, Felandus Thames, Shingo Yamazaki.

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Artists who live away from their native countries tend to experience nostalgia prompting them to recreate familiar landscapes, interiors and customs. New York-based painter Azadeh Nia repeatedly depicts Iran's Damavand mountain, a symbol of resistance, as well as balconies and terraces where she spent a great deal of her childhood in Tehran. Sebastian Ore Blas recalls the front door of his grandparents’ house in Lima, Peru, lovingly recreating the curves of its metal entry gate, only to overpaint them in white, obfuscating direct access to the distant memory. Canadian Sylvia Trotter Ewens, originally from Honduras, dreams of lush foliage drowned in a tropical light inside a once grand building taken over by nature. The characters of Christina Lucia Giuffrida’s painting frolic in a paradisiacal setting of Australian bush. The chromatic picture, painted in New York, is an auto-fiction that examines the artist’s longing for a far-away home that seems to only exist in her own mind. 

 

Childhood memories are often mixed with urban myth and inherited stories, upon which time and distance cast a new light. London-based Chinese artist Tang Shuo revisits the old tales of his father’s native village. His barefoot dwellers roam the countryside in search of answers, their destinies and secrets reverberating for generations to come. The sensual protagonists in the works on paper by the Taiwanese artist Henry Hung Chang, based in New York, recreate sacred rituals of his ancestors in dreamlike settings, both venerating and upending the tradition. Yifan Jiang’s maritime search scene is similarly shrouded in mystery. The figures on the opposite shores resemble each other in the dark of night, perhaps forming a metaphor for an immigrant seeking a new identity with their shadow forever lingering in their native land.

 

A distant memory of home can provide strength and refuge, and help process the present. A few years ago, triggered by the events in Ukraine, Darina Karpov, who was born in the USSR and has lived in the US for decades, suddenly felt inundated with flashbacks from her childhood in Saint Petersburg. The resulting paintings, referencing Soviet cartoons, Russian literature and fairy tales, as well as the artist’s memories, have functioned both as healing anchors and as reminders that the past and present are never entirely apart. Shuto Okayasu’s Brooklyn dweller seems to be dream walking: a Buddhist symbol appears in a bodega window and a kissing scene from a Japanese film is unfolding overhead. The artist’s memories of home merge with the everyday reality thousands of miles away. Peter Hong-Tsun Chan’s paintings refer to his childhood – via popular Japanese films he watched back then, and badminton, a game he played as a boy. A sport that originated in British India and is now a favorite in China, and Japanese films from the nineties affect a Canadian man from Hong Kong – diasporic memory has a circuitous way of forming and operating around the world.  

 

Children of immigrants — Adam de Boer, Diana Sinclair, Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Shingo Yamazaki and Benny Or mine history and memory to bring attention to complicated subjects connected to their ancestry. De Boer pays homage to his father’s Dutch-Indonesian roots by applying traditional batik technique onto the subject that’s closer to home, a lake in Los Angeles. De Boer’s long-standing interest in the medium, often seen as craft in the West and weighted with colonial history, is a conscious attempt to explore his heritage and to bring a wider attention to batik. Japanese-Korean American born in Honolulu, Yamazaki paints a pair of Hawaiian flip flops floating above a submerged figure, perhaps referring to the mysteries hidden in the deep waters of convoluted diasporic histories. New Jersey-based Sinclair, whose parents hail from Barbados and Panama, explores the grueling stories of enslaved Africans who perished in the ocean during the Middle Passage. Alvarez-Backus, who lives in New York, often uses materials – birdseed, repurposed iron window bars, Manila palm leaves – that are rooted in his personal or inherited memories of the Philippines in order to explore cultural meanings and issues associated with them. A Canadian with parents from Hong Kong, Benny Or depicts an ancient Khmer sculpture at the Met Museum about to be repatriated to Cambodia, not unlike diasporic experience, “carrying a history of movement, loss and return.”

 

Finally, Kwesi O. Kwarteng’s colorful textile collages and Felandus Thames’s beaded portrait celebrate diaspora as a phenomenon with both local and global implications. Thames’ work depicts the influential African American artist David Hammons against a bold African pattern. By titling the piece King David of the People’s Republic of Harlem, Thames highlights the power of diaspora and its leaders across time and space. Inspired by the symbolic meanings attached to textiles in his native Ghana, Kwarteng merges swatches of local fabrics sourced from around the globe into a flowing river of patterns, underscoring the unifying force of diasporic memory as a source of inspiration and pride.

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