Wendy Wei & Edmund Bao: Fleeting Hues of Passage

Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456 is pleased to present Wendy Wei & Edmund Bao: Fleeting Hues of Passage. on view from January 24, 2025, through February 7, 2025.

Exhibition Statement

How should we envision the vestiges of migration? As an unfolding experience, the passage of migration disrupts and makes visible the calcified assumption of a typically linear timeline. The spatial and temporal alterations of migration render a peculiar vision that is often too opaque to be effable—it juxtaposes “now” and “then”, “here” and “there”, “you” and “us”, where we can only inhabit two worlds simultaneously yet within each, we are total strangers.

The homeland, extending its gaze from the hazy past, becomes our sensuous archive that persistently reconfiguring the present. Wendy Wei and Edmund Bao, both as Chinese diasporic visual artists, intuit sophisticated visibility through their gentle, careful remaking of the “past”. Attuned to the uncanny moments concealed in the fading shadows of our memories, Wendy and Edmund craft a perception of “past” beyond mere symbolism attached to objects, instead as an open terrain performed through textures and lines, blending colors and melting contours.

In Wendy’s work, crosshatched opaque watercolor seems to mimic a weaving texture or flickering old TV screens; multiple mediums are almost crowdedly, densely layered together, forming an overwhelming dreamscape, from which we cannot evade yet to which we have never ventured. Edmund, with improvisational moves of acrylic and charcoal on raw canvas, sketches out a playground for emerging gestures, movements, and visages. Restless confrontations come forth in the much-suspended, alternative sequence of rituals and practices.

Fleeting Hues of Passage is set to exhibit during Chinese New Year’s Eve, a time traditionally meant for people to be “together,” yet in this context, it becomes more specifically about being “alone together” at this remote, alternative “home”—New York City. Why are we here? How shall we feel? This exhibition is thus a wishful invitation for us to venture into this uncanny space, with elusive traces of our past and ongoing selves, through every keen and discerning gaze.

Opening Reception: Jan 24, 2025, 6-8pm

Please contact info@caacarts.org for more information.

Artist Bio

Edmund Bao, an artist originally from China and currently studying at the School of Visual Arts, creates work that explores themes such as burial traditions, cultural identity, and the tensions between deeply rooted customs and modern societal mandates. Bao employs a wide range of media, including installation, printmaking, and painting, treating all these methods as extensions of drawing.

Funerary traditions form a central focus in Bao’s current practice. In August 2024, he participated in an art residency with Air3331 in Japan, where he explored the connections and divergences between Chinese and Japanese funeral customs.

Wendy Wei (b. 2000) is an MFA candidate at School of Visual Arts. She was born in Vancouver and grew up in Shenzhen, China. Her paintings are about love and homeland. She draws inspiration from her own dreams to reveal her fears and hidden desires. Her recent body of work imagines and recreates scenarios where she pokes fun at herself, grappling with internal conflicts and authenticity.

Curator Bio

Weifan Mo (Michelle) is a writer, creator, and curator in the Philosophy Department at the New School for Social Research, with scholarly interests that encompass aesthetics, phenomenology, Ancient Greek philosophy & literature, affect theory, modern & postmodern studies, visual culture and films. Her academic and creative initiatives center around interdisciplinary artistic practices that channel our intellectual life with everyday living experience. She employs the project of aesthetics study as a filter to encapsulate the affective dynamics surrounding each individual in the modern and postmodern context.

Gallery 456

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Address: 456 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013, Elevator Accessible Contact: (212) 431-9740 | info@caacarts.org

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Chinese American Arts Council's Gallery 456 Visual Arts Exhibition Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Gove­­­rnor and the New York State Legislature.