Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don't Make Work About Being Asian, Arario Gallery exhibition card

Who likes being pigeon-holed? Who cares for binary imperatives? Not the nearly fifty artists showing in Arario Gallery's Irrelevant show, or its curators, Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng. For most of the past decade, contemporary Asian art has been a hot commodity in galleries and institutional collections. As the hunger to anticipate the next Pacific-rim star has escalated, so too have the emphasis on "New Japanese Photography" or "New Video Art from China." Such trending of individual artists and entire swaths of culture has induced a little much-need backlash, and Irrelevant seeks to address its grievances that not all Asian artists are making art about their Asian-ness, per se. From the press release:

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.

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.

Two noteworthy participants in this exhibition is JBP's very own Youngna Park, and 20x200 artist and Hot Shot Yijun Liao.

Birdhouse by Youngna Park

Try to Live Like a Pair of Siamese Twins, from the series Experimental Relationship by Yijun Liao

Both photographers have understated qualities of lightness and looking to them; Youngna Park's images are those of a photographer's photographer, with a superhero ability to find quiet and resplendent light in even the darkest and busiest of places, and as Jen has written of her images, "What I love about Youngna's work is that it doesn't just remind me to look, but how." Her photos attest to her innate sense that home is wherever you are, and whether showing us a view of a swimmhole in Oregon, a backyard dinner in Berlin, or street scenes in her current hometown of New York, the felt sense of them is never photographer-as-tourist, but rather that of enviable insider giving us our own special secret to hold. (nota bene: her first 20x200 edition is completely sold out, but two others are available through 11:59pm, Tuesday, June 29th, 2010, for a complete steal at 20% off in our RIDONK sale)

Yijun Liao's images possess a quirky bemusement in projects that detail various forms of self-inquiry from actual relationships, imaginary ones and things she's both not seen and places she has really lived in. Sort of a kinder, gentler version of Les Krims, or maybe a more precise metric would be the dreamy, humorous narratives of Duane Michals, her work deals with the personal and autobiographical in a manner that is not off-putting or self-indulgent. Picking through the various bodies of work on her website, I am left wanting to see more of a series, or just more of her brand of vision in general. And I've been in love with her edition from 20x200 and intend to get it at sale price right after posting this (because I remain paranoid that all that I love will sell out before I can safely procure them).

The Arario Gallery opening is this Thursday, July 1, 6—8 PM. Put it on your calendar to go out and see their work (and them!) in person.

Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian
Arario Gallery
On View: July 1 - August 6, 2010
521 West 25th street, 212-206-2760
Chelsea