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In Infinite Cage, a diverse gathering of Bay Area-based Chinese- and Taiwanese-American contemporary artists explores materials, identities, and histories that constrain a myriad of subjective possibilities. The group exhibition centers on diasporic perspectives, featuring site-specific mixed media installation, fabric works, sound, sculpture, painting, video and more. A mixture of past and new works will be presented.
An absurdist paradox, the Infinite Cage invites contemplation on the constraints of human experiences and the possibilities of transcending those constraints, as is at the root of aesthetic creation and expression. The artistic impulse is to start with particular and limited material and transmute them into a freedom of meaning and limitless experience.
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Artist Conversations
Sat, Aug 12, 3:30 pm
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The eight wide-ranging artists present work as interpretation of this infinite cage, whether as whimsical absurdity or a glimpse of enlightenment—or both—bringing disparate forms and identities into coincidence and beyond. Stella Zhang's series of bound chairs ask us to consider female identity even if the materials' references break free under their own tensions. Bijun Liang's fabric sculpture is stuffed into a suppression of ropes and set free, both in form and linguistically.
Kacy Jung's distorted figures investigate the infinite malleability of constructed identities, releasing them to float in the barest of surreal existences. Wanxin Zhang uses classical high-fired clay to create moments of haptic transition and individuality inside their apparent restrictions, permanence, and timelessness.
Xiaoze Xie's photo lithographs and painting poetically capture the ethereality of ancient books, drawing attention to the gallery's previous existence as a school, a space of inaccessible knowledge, nostalgia, and time immemorial. Gabby Wen's disembodied sound sculptures sonically haunt the gallery, grounding the provisional listener in the echoes of belonging and the serenity of memories.
Weimin Zhang's multimedia film projection takes us on an introspective journey on what we leave behind in our relationship with ourselves and the environment. Summer Mei Ling Lee stills a creature of flight into stone, rendering a porcelain egg-shape vitreous when cremating and indexing the earthly ashes of a hummingbird, in an infinite loop of birth and death.
Through all of these works, and the relationships between them, nostalgia, belonging, resistance, identity and permanence are embodied and then set free and re-embodied again, leaving behind creases, bindings, imprints…—memories that signify presence. In this fluctuating state of liminality, meanings and narratives become an embodied cage for the viewer to negotiate towards freedom themselves.
The exhibition has been graciously coordinated by Stephan Xie.
The community is invited to discover more about the artist's practices, motivations and inspirations, during an afternoon of Artists Conversations, on Saturday, August 12, 3:30 pm.
Sanchez Art Center is located at 1220 Linda Mar Blvd in Pacifica, about a mile east of Highway 1. Following opening night, the galleries are open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 1–5 pm, and by appointment, through Aug 20.
The opening, talks, and gallery visits are free as part of the center's focus on "Creating Community through Art".
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