UPSTREAM

On view through September 4th

Presented past The Research House for Asian Art (RHAA), Upstream features Decheng Cui, Weiyang Gao, Kalman Pool, and Margaux Siegel, four aspiring artists moving upstream in their artistic careers. The exhibition volition be on view until Saturday, September iv, 2021.

Curated by Jiangtian Han, Siting Wang, and Myra Xu.

Special cheers to Qiuyang Shen.

Viewings are by appointment only. You can make an appointment past emailing us at theresearchhouseforasianart@gmail.com or by messaging us on WeChat or Instagram. Parties express to 15 persons.

Upstream — It can exist a class, an action, an attitude, a technique, or a memory, nevertheless, it is a process, a procedure of breaking the original being. The four artists, all former students of oil painting, present their works as both a reflection on their creative process and an innovation of the medium. Each work presents a procedure with a distinctive individuality, and together they give a new meaning to "upstream" — a possibility

Upstream explores the presence and the absence of bodies within the pictorial infinite. On the one hand, Siegel and Kalman experiment with the organic form and its distortion and disintegration on canvas --- with her displaced figures, Siegel dives into an abstract chaos in the virtual infinite to piece of work through mourning, family dynamics, abandonment, survival, destruction, and love. Kalman's organic figures flow and drain in and beyond the canvas, provoking questions near the dialectical human relationship between virtuality and amount. On the other hand, Wei and Decheng explore the absence of actual representations in pursuit of transcendence across history, temporality, and flesh --- coming from a multicultural groundwork, Wei is perceptive and disquisitional of the constructed systems of beliefs across nations and cultures, which led him to build imagery of sacred spaces beyond cultural and historical paradigm. Through the means of logic and mathematics, Decheng Cui investigates both the phenomenal and the rational aspect of sensibility in his visual artworks. Together, these works call attention to the embodiment and disembodiment enabled by a virtual infinite.

MARGAUX SIEGEL

Margaux Siegel, Nightshade, Oil on canvas, 36''x 36''

Margaux Siegel, Nightshade, Oil on canvas, 36''x 36''

Margaux Siegel, Current, Oil on canvas, 42

Margaux Siegel, Electric current, Oil on canvas, 42" 10 36"

Margaux Siegel was built-in in West Virginia. She received a Master of Fine Arts caste in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Fine art Constitute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2021, where she was awarded a Leon W Guggenheim Scholarship, a Teaching Fellowship from 2019–2020, and a Roving Substitute position for SAIC'southward Painting and Drawing Department from 2020-2021. She received a dual Bachelor of Fine Arts caste Summa Cum Laude in Painting and Printmaking from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2015. She completed residencies in Venice and Sorrento through MICA and in New York through the Schoolhouse of Visual Arts (SVA) and MICA. She studied jewelry design, papermaking and digital fabrication through the Rhode Island School of Blueprint. She has exhibited work at the Earth Trade Center and Area 405 in Baltimore, Maryland, and participated in SVA'due south Open Studio Exhibition in Dense, New York. During the summer of 2020, she received the Steketee Scholarship to attend Ox-Bow'southward Residency Program. She maintains a studio practice in Chicago, Illinois.

Siegel uses her studio as a place to work through mourning, family dynamics, abandonment, survival, devastation, and beloved. She considers her oils on canvas to be interdisciplinary because she allows her experience in other mediums to inform her decisions. Siegel's piece of work is a combination of figure ground relationships, abstraction and figuration, and an integration of her split up modes of making. Her formal decisions and combinations are in direct response to her psychological state and a reflection of her subconscious. She uses the separation of bodies and space to evoke deportation and overlapping realms. Shortly later losing a parent, figuration re-entered her piece of work. She uses gesture drawings as a tool to capture the impressions of bodies. She uses patterns in the form of traps, gates, and nets to explore divisions. Her figures are quietly embedded in abstract chaos, and displaced in an undefined space. Siegel's family unit history is specific to her, but is too part of a larger conversation nearly sectionalisation and displacement.

KALMAN Pool

Kalman Pool, 11, Acrylic on canvas, 46''x 36''

Kalman Puddle, 11, Acrylic on canvas, 46''x 36''

Kalman Pool completed his BFA from the School of the Fine art Found of Chicago in 2019, followed past his MA in painting at the Royal Higher of Art in London in 2021. Concurrently he attended the Swatch Art Peace Hotel every bit Creative person-in-Residence, where he was invited to create a Swatch X You artist special watch.

Inspired by BioArt and natural history, Puddle'due south interdisciplinary works examine the dialectical relationship between virtual and physical, seemingly reconciling both by means of fantastically inventing VR-fabricated bio-mutated phantasms, inflatable simulacra, and invented pictographic linguistic communication installations.

WEIYANG GAO

Weiyang Gao, The Second Step, Oil, Acrylic and ink on canvas, 36''x 36''

Weiyang Gao, The Second Step, Oil, Acrylic and ink on canvas, 36''x 36''

Weiyang Gao is a Chinese artist who currently works in Chicago. Wei received his BFA in 2013 from Boston University and his MFA in painting and drawing in 2021 from Schoolhouse of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wei'south paintings blur the categories of figuration and abstraction. Within them, he utilizes themes of pattern, space, and lite in relation to the man trunk to talk over and critique the constructions of systems of conventionalities. Being an artist with a multicultural background, He has insight into the many ways people take used and driveling culture and history to create barriers and divisions inside the broader spectrum of humanity. Within his paintings, he addresses the feelings of being oppressed past those barriers and divisions while looking for places that could transcend both civilization and history. Wei has shown at the Sloan Firm in Boston, Guayaba Gallery in Union Urban center, Visionary Projection in New York, Gummies Gallery in Chicago, FLXST Gimmicky Art Gallery in Chicago, etc.

DECHENG CUI

Decheng Cui, Kidney line 1, Digital art on wood, 24''x 36''

Decheng Cui, Kidney line ane, Digital art on wood, 24''x 36''

Decheng Cui is a conceptual artist whose works are never limited to any artistic language, from traditional oil painting to animation and more. He obtained his two undergraduate diplomas, B.F.A in painting and B.A in Industrial Design (Scientific discipline), in People's republic of china in 2013. Later on graduation, he transferred his interest from traditional painting and design to contemporary art. He has been making contemporary art at an MFA program of the Schoolhouse of the Fine art Constitute of Chicago since 2017. Decheng has shown his work through solo and group exhibitions and art fairs in many countries.


The purpose of Decheng'due south work is to utilise information technology to fight fearfulness from death. Since the demise of the flesh is inevitable, then he can only find ways to plant the fragments of his soul among human civilizations, to root information technology to console himself. Therefore, it is unimportant to him that what kind of art language he uses, but rather his concept and soul played a crucial role in the works. Decheng never totally believes and follows his feeling to create artworks, and he believes his thinking and logic are much more than trustworthy.