Lotus L. Kang

Work from Borne at Esther Schipper, Berlin.

“Lengths of unfixed industrial film, ‘skins’ as Kang refers to them, are draped over and across raw steel tubes suspended from the ceiling. The shadowy impressions on the film create layered, visceral timescales, rendered in a palette of yellow, orange, red, purple and brown. By intentionally misusing the material, exposing it to sunlight and manipulating its exposure in both planned and unforeseen ways, the artist has invented modes of inscribing her process, turning the film into indexes of overlapping durations. The film is ‘tanned’ across multiple sites: her studio, her home, and predominantly, in a greenhouse situated in upstate New York.” – Esther Schipper

Nguyen Phuong Linh

Work from Sanctified Clouds.

“Almost 200 small masses of Sanctified Clouds fly over the wall, foam beautifully and shine in a blue hue, the blue of peace, Oriental ceramics, and sacred mosaic paintings in Arabic temples. However, looking closely, we realize that these soft white are not clouds, but actually the masses of dust and smoke bursting all around. Nguyen Phuong Linh collected images of bomb explosions, initially in the Vietnam War, and then gradually expanded to other conflict areas in the Middle East. To emphasize further the insensitive violence of bombing, Phuong Linh cut off the entire context of the photos, leaving only smoke and dust swirling in midair.” – Nguyen Art Foundation

Naraphat Sakarthornsap

Work from his oeuvre.

“…In many of his works, Naraphat Sakarthornsap presents stories of inequality in the society and gender discrimination through photography and installation art, in which flowers play the leading roles. Many kinds of flowers that Naraphat uses usually comes with profound meanings. Those flowers have become the keys to finding the answers that are neatly hidden in the works of art. And sometimes the photographs of these delicate flowers of Naraphat may possibly come from the deepest part of his devastated heart.

Naraphat’s early works presented the challenge against nature in trying to prolong the freshness of the flower before he develops the ideas to become the challenge against power and influence in the society through the pictures of these flowers. Therefore, do not believe in what the flowers in front of you appear to be. But look for the messages these flowers are hiding. Perhaps, what Naraphat is facing and trying to present is the same as the ones many others are inevitably struggling with, over the standards in the society, where inequalities are all around them.” – Naraphat Sakarthornsap

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Work from Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. @ Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

“Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s new body of work explores the image as a space of ellipsis, in which works’ affective and spatial intimacies exist on the threshold of the inexpressible. In these new photographs, images sometimes seem to separate out from their material supports. Even in close-up portraits, subjects and expressions don’t quite find resolution within the image. New portraits yield intense, combative, and sometimes uncanny scenes that are at the same time tender and graceful. In more abstract works, Brown reveals areas of visual friction and pictorial indistinction where we might have sought out clarity of form.” – Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Anna Ostoya

Work from Autopis: Notes, Copies and Masterpieces.

“The complexity of a lived historical reality inevitably gets simplified through representation. On this fulcrum, Ostoya’s art operates critically. She purposefully creates oppositional binaries from her source materials, manipulating history in order to show how malleable and complex (rather than predetermined and fixed) it is. This she achieves through artistic means, first by a process of selection and appropriation then augmentation, transposition, elision, and the countless other tools at her disposal. Ostoya tells us clearly that art is a site of discourse, perpetually in flux and responsive to its time.” – Paulina Pobocha, Zachęta catalogue, 2018

Naoya Hatakeyama

Work from Tsunami Trees.

“Tsunami Trees, which Hatakeyama has been working on since 2018 and has culminated in a photobook in 2024, is a group of works documenting the trees and landscapes left behind on the Pacific coast that retain the traces of the tsunami. In 2017, six years after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Hatakeyama came across a walnut tree on a riverbank upstream from the Kesen River, which flows through his hometown of Rikuzentakata. The tree, which Hatakeyama calls ‘half a tree’, has abundant foliage on its left half, but the trunk of the right half was damaged by the objects from the Tsunami, preventing water and nutrients from reaching the dead branches. Driven by the urge to find similar trees, Hatakeyama traveled around the Tohoku region with the help of his acquaintances, and when he came across trees that had been affected by the disaster in various ways, he recorded them with his large format camera. The Tsunami Trees captured in the photographs bring us back to our awareness of the relationship between trees and people; at times the trees are revered as a steadfast presence, and at other times they are inconsiderately cut down and used. The newly constructed seawalls and highways around the freestanding trees also provide a glimpse of the time that has passed since the disaster, evoking our individual memories.” – Taka Ishii Gallery

Yang Yongliang

Work from Imagined Landscape.

“Imagined Landscape is conceived during the pandemic. When the world turned black and white during the 2020/2021 COVID lock-down, I stayed in New York re-thinking about Shanghai. The pandemic has affected everybody in the world, even though we might not be able to articulate what’s been changed in us, we’re all responding to it in one way or the other. For more than a decade, I always find peace in my own works; they are a sanctuary for me, like a hermit having their own private utopia. But as I look at them now I almost find them too heavy to go back to, so I imagined something new, something charming and delightful, with colors. This series is dedicated to a shifting world, and especially for the ones who remain hopeful moving forward.” – Artist’s site

Gohar Dashti

Work from Land/s.

“Regardless of who we are, our lives are layered and richly textured with physical and figurative uprooting(s) and migrations.

On one of my trips, an immigrant friend asked me to take a postcard back to her family in our country of origin (Iran); on the front of the postcard was a photograph of the natural environment in her new home (U.S). On the back she had written, “I live here. A place similar to our home.” Furthermore, I remember a documentary (Jaddoland, Directed by Nadia Shihab), in which the filmmaker visits her Iraqi mother living in Texas. During a drive through the Texas landscape, she reflects on the “vastness” of her mother’s longing for a sense of home. “The landscape of west Texas was a mirror image of Iraq, and it was this other memory of home that she searched for.”

I am drawn to nature with these similar stories and their ubiquitous presence in my life. The idea of my “Land/s” series grew out of a fascination with these human/geographical narratives and their interconnection with my own personal experience.

As for so many others, nature is what connects me to my homeland. It transcends borders and stays with me in the space that I live in now (Cambridge, MA). It is a base layer, a lens, an overlay; a tendril of wild fern sneaking into the frame. The limitless reach of nature and landscapes – that reach across cultural and political divisions –as well as the ways in which immigrants inevitably search out and reconstruct familiar topographies in a foreign land, together tell a story familiar to all humans.

However, this is a paradox of identity and belonging. Sometimes, I see a tree similar to one we had in our yard in my hometown (Ahvaz, Iran) but I feel a different connection with this new tree because its roots and fragrance are different as they grew in another climate and soil. I even hear distinct bird sounds from these two trees. When I stand in the new land and look at this new tree which I have no memories associated with, I try to recall my old memories and reinvigorate.

In my practice, I bring two disparate environments into coexistence, creating staged interventions that induce uncertainty and complicity in equal measure, announcing themselves as fictitious yet compelling a suspension of disbelief. The images in the “Land/s” are not created using a simple montage technique. They are, rather, the result of endless journeys across two continents and the subsequent transportation of these images into an alternate natural landscape, by the sea, in the mountains, or in the forests, where the composition of the picture acts as a link between what is in the foreground and what is in the background, sometimes exposing and sometimes obscuring the way the picture was constructed. I consider how the intimate relationship between mankind and nature can create new narratives related to issues on global migration. How landscapes could have Human/geographical narrative meaning.” – Gohar Dashti

Taca Sui

Work from Steles – Huang Yi Project.

“The latest body of work collectively titled Steles (2015) focuses on the stone steles that have played such a crucial role in the documentation of the history of China. In this case he was inspired by the late Qing dynasty imperial bureaucrat Huang Yi (1744-1802) who in his leisure time was also a dedicated amateur archaeologist, painter, poet and calligrapher. In the last years of the 18th century he made two trips in which the focus was on documenting steles mainly located in Shandong Province and Henan Province. Through his travel diaries, paintings, and rubbings, he provided an invaluable record of cultural artifacts that otherwise might have disappeared altogether through neglect. Like Huang Yi 200 years before him, Taca embarked on expeditions to locate traces of the past as preserved in steles but whereas Huang Yi could still identify, describe and catalogue actual examples, Taca had to be satisfied with inscriptions that are largely erased through the passage of time or exist only in fragmentary state. Recognizing the futility of his task, he nonetheless perseveres in preserving whatever he can. At the opposite end of the spectrum from documentary photography, Taca’s images have a forlorn and timeless beauty that are simultaneously totally specific and yet evocative of the relentless passing of time.” – Taca Sui

Mishka Henner

Work from Evaporation Ponds.

“Evaporation Ponds presents the dazzling geometries of waste reservoirs created by natural gas production. Seen from above, their glowing expanses resemble luminous abstractions, recalling Colour Field painting or celestial photographs. Yet beneath this painterly surface lies a record of toxicity: landscapes engineered to dispose of industrial by-products, rendered strangely seductive through the impartial gaze of the satellite. By aestheticising what is ordinarily concealed, they expose the dissonance between beauty and harm at the heart of contemporary energy systems.” – Mishka Henner