For the inaugural edition of Art SG, Make Room will be presenting a booth of artists that represent the gallery’s evolving program, diverse positions, and growing reach. Yuri Yuan and Yesiyu Zhao are part of a new generation of young painters in New York attempting to translate the experience of contemporary urban life into aesthetically compelling and formally interesting pictures that also reflect on the relationship between memory and place, subjectivity and the appearance of things. In a similar way, the enigmatic paintings of Kira Maria Shewfelt, Yoab Vera, and Guimi You often turn the California landscape into mirage-like visions suffused with a prophetic air. Jacopo Pagin and Andrew Sendor approach their practice from a more historical perspective, testing the degree to which art today can provide a narrative that explains the direction and course of past, present, and future. Finally, the monstrous aspect of the dynamic between culture and self comes to the forefront in the work of Shana Hoehn, Miguel Angel Payano, Catalina Ouyang, and Astra Huimeng Wang, who use their upbringing and personal
history to mix and combine references drawn from different cultural spheres while exploring the complex and contradictory process of identity formation in a globalized world.
In the FILM sector, Xin Liu’s The White Stone offers a speculative take on technology, archaeology, and the future of ruins, while Bix Archer’s contribution to NEW/NOW is an intriguing update of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère via Morandi and Brooklyn.
