Fireflies, night sky, climate canary, and
phoenix peony
HER POWER Global Female Contemporary Art Online Exhibition 2021 · Chapter Fifteen
Curated by
(Click to see their preface and forword)
2021 · HER POWER
The prologue of the "Life．Blossom” Exhibition - "Her Power" Online Exhibition, was jointly initiated by HK Art of Nature International Female Art Research Society, Art Life Foundation, and female artists and art institutions.
The first stage will bring the recommendations from our academic consultants, invited curators and International Women Artists Federation as pilot. Up to now, we have received works from around 120 artists from more than 30 regions (including oil paintings, ink paintings, installations, sculptures, photography, digital images, etc.).
The call for works is still open to public. The online exhibition will also be published by region, theme, category, subject, or material.
The content of the online exhibition will be presented on Art of Nature’s official website and the platform of "Her Art", Facebook, and overseas online platforms.
HER POWER
Art of Nature Intrenational Female Art Online Exhibition
Orgainisors :
HK Art of Nature International Female Art Research Society, Art Life Foundation
SCENE 9+9/ part 2 · FIFTEEN
Night Sky · Flowers Bloom and Fall · Climate Canary
Cactus · Sheep Meadow · Pheonix and Peony
Peggy Ahwesh
NIGHT SKY
Peggy Ahwesh is a Brooklyn- based media artist active since the 1970’s, whose work traverses a variety of technologies and styles in an inquiry into feminism, cultural identity and genre. Ahwesh’s practice insists on political and social topicality handled with theoretical rigor, while simultaneously employing humor and the absurd in an open embrace of the inexplicable.
PEGGY AHWESH
Ahwesh was Professor of Film at Bard College for 30 years teaching video production, history of media and technology and media archival practices. She has taught in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) and for Bard’s affiliate Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia and the al-Quds Bard Partnership at al-Quds University in the occupied West Bank, Palestine. Ahwesh is represented by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn New York.
Having won numerous awards, including the Alpert Art Award, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Scholarship, Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, and sponsorship from the New York State Arts Council. Her works are exhibited in art galleries such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as Yerba Buena Art Center in San Francisco.
Selected exhibitions:
2020 The Armory Show, solo booth. Microscope Gallery, New York
2019 Unsettled States, New Media ArtSpace, Baruch College, New York
2013 The Art of Pixilvision, lecture & screening, New Museum, New York
2011 Pittsburgh Biennial, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Ape of Nature installation Images Festival, Toronto, Canada,
2010 The Private Glance, Tate Modern, London, England
Artist Statement
Maybe every maker has a film in which they’re trying to work out what they want to convey through filmmaking.
I came of age in the 1970’s with feminism, punk and amateur Super 8 movie making. Formats, points of view, political positions and life styles inspired by these areas of investigation remain relevant to me and linger with a trace on everything I do.
——Peggy Ahwesh
NIGHT SKY, digital video, 2020, 2.5 min, sound
NIGHT SKY, digital video, 2020, 2.5 min, sound
The restless night owl Peggy Ahwesh likes to travel and “have adventures”.
So since the “world was topsy turvy this summer,”* she scouted locations in upstate NY during the day, drove out along deserted country roads in the midnight hour (and they were very deserted this year) and took pictures of the stars and her fellow nocturnals, the fireflies.
The equipment she employed was a regular DSLR camera with a downloaded time lapse app, a tripod and a flashlight. She used the flashlight to focus the camera which scared away the flies (actually beetles), waited for them to come back, set the app to take 60 pictures in twenty minutes, pressed start and drank tea in her car by the side of the road in pitchblack darkness.
I asked if it was scary, and she said “I wasn’t scared, but it was eerie.”
The film was made in her backyard in Catskill. Ahwesh used thee neighbors’ motion sensor lights to provide extra color and drama:
I asked her how she programmed the lights.
“Oh, I just would go over and wave my arms around them.”
Ahwesh really is a master of using high and low technology for unintended purposes and unexpected results.
NIGHT SKY, digital video, 2020, 2.5 min, sound
Hong Bian
FLOWERS BLOOM AND FALL
Calligraphy is a daily lesson in Bian Hong's life. Zhang Yanyuan, a Scholar of the Tang Dynasty in China, wrote in his book “Famous Paintings of The Past Dynasties”: "It is because the ink is transported and the five colors are provided, which is called satisfaction." Say traditional Chinese painting with ink to express colorful, in the spirit of the basis is to convey the need. Ink painting is a color of the most simple hue and contains the most rich color class, while the abstract, simple and dynamic lines in calligraphy are more concise, but the more deeply reflects the essence of human life.
Since her childhood, Bian Hong has been exploring the possibility of painting and writing through ink in the process of combing ink and paper with a new way of seeking "Dao". Her work goes beyond the usual traditional calligraphic language and focuses on life experience in her black and white lines.
HONG BIAN
In 1989, she was admitted to the Calligraphy and Seal Cutting Department of Henan Zhengzhou Academy of Arts. Graduated from the Calligraphy Teaching and Research Department of The Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995; In 2013, she was awarded the Outstanding Artist Award by American Asian Artists Foundation and American American Artists Association (New York). Her works are in many international and Chinese art institutions as well as private collections.
Selected Exhibitions:
2019“DoubleX”International artists group exhibition .Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York;
2016-2019 Los Angeles Art Fair;
2013, Bian Hong's New Abstract Calligraphy solo exhibition, 456 Gallery, New York;
2009, 1970s Ink And Wash Exhibition, Beijing;(by famous critic Mr.Jia Fang Zhou)
2006, Thirty years’
Chinese Modern 、Contemporary Ink Art Exhibition, Beijing;（by famous critic 、doctor Mr.Liu Xiao Chun ）
Artist Statement
"Calligraphy accompanies me to grow up in the vision of life. Even when I walk on the street, the traces I see are intricate and varied, and the enjoyment of artistic philosophy when writing calligraphy.
My calligraphy brush of the writing ink on the rice paper, is an experience of observing the Dao, and I meet myself in the Dao. The heart is true, the ink line of writing, the strange soul. The mind, the rhythm of ink, and the rhythm of dance. the writing feeling and thinking of life."
——Hong Bian
Han Yun, ink (jiao mo), on rice paper, 70 x 70 cm, 2017-2020
Hua Kai Hua Luo
ink (jian mo)
on rice paper
137 x 33.8 cm
2017-2020
Zhi Hui
ink (jian mo)
160 x 46 cm
2017-2020
Hong Bian's “Jiao Mo “ ink art is generated from her calligraphy cultivation and creation. She has focused on exploring the self-consistency of various ink concepts in recent years. Through the variation of coke ink and calligraphy font structure, she has sought the abstract implication among structure, line, space and ink color, and finally transcends the limitation of calligraphy. It forms a kind of drawing schema with both "Jin Shi"style of the calligraphy and modern abstraction, thus overcoming the binary opposition mode of "one or the other" in traditional/modern - contemporary issues.
— Art critic Dr.Xiaochun Liu, Professor of Tsinghua University
Zen, Ink (jiao mo) on rice paper, 60 x 33.8 cm, 2017-2020
Artist Bian Hong regards calligraphy as the essence of individual life and the essence of her freehand ink painting. In modern and contemporary times, her works have reached such a state of painting, in the pursuit of a new vigorous style in ink. She is skilled in the free flow of chinese brush and ink, pursues personal artistic language, and finds her own language between tradition and individuality, which is the aesthetic experience hidden in her works, composed of Chinese brush and ink, calligraphy, poetics and consciousness of the Times.
— Art critic/curator Mr. Huang Du
Daniella Dooling
CLIMATE CANARY
Daniella Dooling probably bring us a set of modern apocalypses from the perspective of the artist.This is an otherworldly realm of both extreme formal beauty and undreamed-of suffering. Through medical experiments and obsessive-compulsive postures sculptural processes, The bird which’s physical body sealed in the crystal world reveals a kind of metaphorical relationship to disruptive notions and beauty.
DANIELLA DOOLING
Daniella Dooling received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art. She has taught at Bard College since 2003 and currently lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
Solo exhibitions include Esther Massry Gallery, Albany, N.Y., Incident Report, Hudson, N.Y., Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, New York, N.Y.; Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, N.Y.; and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, N.Y. Recent performances of “Room 10 Rants” (in collaboration with Les LeVeque) have been hosted by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, N.Y., LAB space, Great Barrington, N.Y., and the Esther Massry Gallery, Albany, N.Y.
Selected Exhibitions:
2021 “Material Matters,” Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA
2020 “The Current Thing,” curated by Caspar Stracke and Keith Sanborn.
2019 “Sense & Nonsense,” Tiny Portals, New Hope, PA
2018 “Time Travelers, Hudson Valley Artists 2018,” Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, NY
2014 Esther Massry Gallery, The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY, Incident Report, Hudson, NY
2008 Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY
Artist Statement
"The term “climate canary” has its origins in the phrase “canary in a coal mine.” These canaries are messengers, harbingers that a particular catastrophic event is near.
Each bird in The Canary Project is embedded in resin casts of natural crystal formations or found rocks. A transparent facet of the cast reveals the embalmed bird, positioned upright and looking forward, a frozen gesture of isolation.
The artificially accelerated fossilization of a canary inside a synthetic geological object placed on display with medical hardware presents us with and entanglement of contradictory realities and temporal instabilities. What sacrificial warning does the canary tell us and when was it revealed?"
——Daniella Dooling
Canary I
2020
Italian taxidermy canary cast in resin, stainless steel and aluminum labware
20 x 8 x 14”
Canary II
2020
Italian taxidermy canary cast in resin, stainless steel and aluminum labware
25 x 6 x 12.5”
Canary II (detail)
2020
Italian taxidermy canary cast in resin, stainless steel and aluminum labware
25 x 6 x 12.5”
Canary IV (detail)
2020
Italian taxidermy canary cast in resin, stainless steel and aluminum labware
32 x 8 x 14”
Canary III (detail)
2020
Italian taxidermy canary cast in resin, stainless steel and aluminum labware
30 x 8 x 14”
Canary III
2020
Italian taxidermy canary cast in resin, stainless steel and aluminum labware
32 x 8 x 14”
Blue Ice Crystal Melts
2019
cast resin and pigment
dimensions variable
Blue Ice Krustallos Melt
2019
Cast resin and pigment
2 x 9 x 6”
Blue Ice Crystal Cluster Melt (detail)
2019
cast resin and pigment
2 x 27 x 18
Reimagining the organic process and formation of quartz crystals, Dooling’s “Krustallos Fossil” series replicates these natural forms into post-natural resin crystals as a reflection upon the growing consumer demand for healing crystals. Clear quartz crystals are believed by many to have healing properties, absorb negative energy, stimulate positive energy, and balance the immune system. Perhaps not so ironically, the global market for healing crystals has revealed both questionable working conditions for those mining crystal specimens and a depletion of this natural resource.
In Dooling’s work, the artificial becomes a synthetic copy of the original crystal - disappearing its healing properties and creating a duplication system through the process of casting. The use of casting fossils has a long-standing tradition in all fields of paleontology, creating a permanent duplicate record of the original form without harming the original fossils. Dooling presents her crystal fossils in laboratory clamps, imagining the scientific study of fossilized natural forms in a post-natural future.
Realistic Weather Radio (detail)
2019
Realistic weather radio embedded in resin
6 x 8.5 x 2.25”
Viscount Transistor Radio
2019
Viscount transistor radio embedded in resin
8.5 x 6 x 2.25”
Tonelux Transistor Radio
2019
Tonelux transistor radio embedded in resin
6 x 8.5 x 2.25”
Realistic Weather Radio
2019
Realistic weather radio embedded in resin
6 x 8.5 x 2.25”
In her radio series, Dooling’s work fossilizes obsolete transistor radios in icy blocks of resin. Produced by the billions in the 1960s and 70s, subjected to the process of incessant technological renewal, these resin encased transistor radios articulate a cycling of desire, rejection, waste and retrieval of being lost in the Anthropocene.
Jingyi Wang
CACTUS
In Wang Jingyi's young career path, she was influenced by many art masters, especially the surrealist style of Rene Magritte from Belgium. The creation of her cactus theme series has been 4-5 years since the beginning of 2016. The painting has a quiet and almost trance-like atmosphere.
The main cactus is the carrier of her emotions. It discusses the contradictory internal and external relations between fragility and arrogance, sharpness and Jixi, which are projected by Lacan's mirror image to some extent. The indifference and crisis of the real world. She uses immersive artistic language to create an allegorical psychological space for her subconscious, and at the same time shows a sensitive emotion and attitude towards the evolution of society and the surrounding environment.
Among them, the "Needle Investigation" created during the epidemic was inspired by the painting "Gabriel and a Sister of Hers" at the Louvre in 2012. It alludes to the ecological problems of Antarctic glacier rupture and expresses it in a relaxed and humorous way. serious question. She brings her unique relaxed humor and a touch of ridicule into the picture, injecting a touch of warmth into the cruel reality.
JINGYI WANG
Jingyi Wang (Chinese, b. 1989) is a New York based visual artist specializes in oil painting. She received her BFA degree from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, received her MFA degree from New York Academy of Art in 2016. Her works had been widely exhibited at Art New York, Sotheby’s New York, the Metropolitan Pavilion, Portraits Inc., Panepinto Galleries, X gallery etc.
Selected Exhibitions:
"The Growing", 2017, America Bank Gallery in New York
Solo exhibition “Soft Sting”, 2019, was opened at Times Arts Gallery in New York in
Online solo exhibition “Natural Social Distancing” 2021 was opened at Four you Gallery in 2021.
Artist Statement
"My artworks focus on the relationship between nature and culture. Nature is always the overarching context of my artworks. It has been almost 5 years since I started using cacti as my subject. Cacti symbolise my own feelings and attitude towards life, for me they signify a helpless state and nervous emotions."
——Jingyi Wang
Poking, Oil on Canvas, 58"x 72”(147x183 cm), 2021
Growing, Oil on Canvas, 42" x 35”(107 x 89 cm) , 2020
Sunshine, Rainbow and Unicorn, 34 x 26 inches
( 86 x 66 cm), Oil on linen, 2021
Friendship, Oil on Canvas, 25.5 “x 33.5”（ 66 x 86 cm）, 2020
Desire#2, Oil on Canvas, 20"x 16”(51 x 41 cm), 2021
Dialogue, 40 x 48 inches (101.6 x 122 cm)，Oil on canvas, 2020
Pool Monster
16x12 inches
(40 x 30 cm)
Oil on linen
2019
Hairdressing
35.5 x 25.5 inches
（90cm x 64.7cm）
Oil on canvas
2021
Susan Wides
BREATHING
Susan Wides lives and works in the Hudson Valley. Nature and perception are driving forces of her work.
Wides uses the language of the lens and its conceptual, psychological, and formal dimensions to create abstract and mixed photographic spaces and integrate them with ecologically-driven expressions. Her lens explores the nuances of perception in our daily lives. When the virtual world seemed to compete with reality, she found, as Baudelaire said, "In our environment, in the hearts of the public..."
She adopts a transformative vision, expressing a intuitive, critical and conceptual responses to our landscape and social environment. Her lens blends her subjects with their surroundings, expressing the interconnectivity of subject and subjectivity, as well as space itself.
SUSAN WIDES
Camera artist and the Curator and Director of ‘T’ Space.
Wides’ work has been shown widely in group exhibitions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The High Museum of Art; The Middlebury College Museum of Art; Pierre Bernard Gallery, Nice, FR; Howard Greenberg Gallery; The Cornell University Gallery; Ronald Feldman Gallery; and The Municipal Art Society.
Wides’s work is held in public collections including The Brooklyn Museum; The Art Museum of Princeton University; la Bibliothèque Nationale; The Bronx Museum; The Haifa Museum of Art; The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College; The International Center of Photography; The New York Public Library; The New School for Social Research; and the Museum of The City of New York.
Selected Exhibitions:
2021 "and something happens to the light" Solo Exhibition, Madelyn Jordon Fine Art, Scarsdale, NY
2017 "This: seasons" Solo Exhibition, Kim Foster Gallery, New York
2017 The group show, Wax Museum curated by Revital Silverman Grun，Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel
2013 "All the Worlds" Solo Exhibition, Kim Foster Gallery”, New York All the Worlds
2011 "Hudson: Manahatta to Kaaterskill "，Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
2010 "Art & Entertainment"Solo Exhibition, Kim Foster Gallery, New York Art & Entertainment
Artist Statement
"My photographs aim to convey the experience of not merely being in a place, but of connecting to that place on multiple levels of consciousness. The photographs rely deeply on light, space and time in order to dissolve, intensify and filter our visualization of a place……The subtle complexity of the images fuse feeling and thought, requiring us to slow down and contemplate where we are, and thus the very "why" and "how" of our being."
——Susan Wides
<Arachnoid>
Pigmented ink print
2002
<Near Catskill Creek>
Pigmented ink print
Oct 15,2004
<Sheeps Meadow>
43 x 40 in
Pigmented ink print
July 2,2007
<Occupy Wall Street>
Pigmented ink print
Nov 17,2011
'I, Mannahatta' documents my perception of place at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st: from the era of the largest building boom in the history of the city up to that time, the crushing reality of the city in the throes of post-9/11 and recession, to the homogenizing, touristic luxury transformations that followed, Both projects depict human constructions and human figures interacting with the social, economic, and natural topographical layers of a landscape with complicated and dynamic histories.
<Emerald City 1 (St. Augustine, FL)>, pigmented ink print, 1985
My relationships with artists in New York and role as a museum photographer led to a fascination in the intersection of experimental practices within institutional settings that would result in the 'Waxworld' series (1983-1990), a response to the fictions of the Reagan years.
'Waxworld' used the question of where reality ends and illusion begins — a given subject of the waxwork displays—as a starting point for exploring a wide range of human interaction within both public and private spheres. I revised the wax museum displays to create new visual artifacts with selective focus, filmic lighting, and multiple exposures, photographing in wax museums throughout North America and Europe. '
<Untitled [Blood]>
Pigmented ink print
1992
In 1992, I began a second museum series, titled 'The Name of And,' in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, partly in response to losing friends who had passed away from AIDS. Reading this culturally fabricated language of flowers, I surrounded the oval images in black and used selective focus to reclaim the flower as an expression of transience, loss and desire.
Vince Aletti wrote: "The flowers in Wides' iris shots all have name tags that swim into focus almost by accident and work like found poetry... [and] suggest an ironic but fiercely tenacious femininity, a realm of the senses you can only enter through the looking glass."
Yulin Huang
PHOENIX AND PEONY
As a successful arts education expert for children, Yulin Huang’s artwork showcases certain purity and straightforwardness of children, such as bright colours, individualized and symbolic patterns. Her paintings do not stop at a pure intuition, but goes on to an abstract and dynamic visual though controlling her sensations by reasonable thinking.
For instance, the appeared disorderly lines are actually a regular and careful special layout. Travelling through the holes all around, the space has gone though several rounds of changes. The literary naming of “Phoenix and Peony” symbolizes the actual object, gives the answer to the nature of object. This belongs to the artist’s landscape world; she weaved a balanced relationship with oriental linguistic style.
YULIN HUANG
Yulin Huang was born in Xinjiang in 1973, she graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the “Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing” in 1997. Since 2001, Yulin has studied children's art and folk art, combining with creation. Currently living in New York, continuing to work as a professional painter. She is a member of Asian Artists Association, Overseas Chinese Artists Association, and Hudson Artists Association.
Artist Statement
"I am not drawing a picture, I am gestating a new life. Every time, I face an "empty" plane, every line,every color...intuition takes me, and my heart guides me into a state of spiritual freedom. There, I was talking to the "I" and communicating with the"I".The "I"was trying to break free, and the"I"was about to breakthrough. Art and me, what will happen in the end......."
——Yulin Huang
<Phoenix and Peony 1>
22 x 28 in
Acrylic pen，paper
2020
<Phoenix and Peony 2>
12 x 16 in
Acrylic pen，paper
2020
<Phoenix and Peony>
47 x 67 in
Acrylic pen，paper
2020
<Phoenix and Peony 3>
12 x 16 in
Acrylic pen，paper
2020
<Phoenix and Peony 4>
12 x 16 in
Acrylic pen，paper
2020
<Phoenix and Peony 5>
12 x 16 in
Acrylic pen，paper
2020
－The End－