Wonder Women
JeŠrey Deitch, Los Angeles 3 September – 22 October
I’ll admit to some scepticism as I walked through the doors of Je¡rey Deitch gallery. Wonder Women is the latest in a series of scenespanning surveys, in this case focusing on Asian-diasporic, nonmale artists, mostly living in North America. Asia is a pretty big and disparate place, and its diaspora just as widely spread. This exhibition, 40 artists-strong, is big, but it is not that big.
I had underestimated Deitch and Kathy Huang, the exhibition’s curator and a director at the gallery. A version of this show originated earlier this year in New York, but here it is expanded by ten new names (including one artist of Pacific Islander descent) and mostly new work. Despite being appropriately broad in approach, there are suffcient fibres – thematic, stylistic, conceptual, tonal – weaving themselves between the works on view to make the whole endeavour seem meaningful and productive. The press release notes that a number of the included artists know each other; even without this information, the exhibition feels like a conversation not primarily about diasporic life, still less about Asian-ness, but about the possibilities within contemporary painting.
One of the main precepts is so ubiquitous right now that it is almost unremarkable: the exhibition comprises, with scant exceptions, figurative painting. An outlier is a blood-red plinth in the middle of one gallery, supporting four apparently abstract lumps of stone by Catalina Ouyang. My stomach lurched when reading the checklist: each of Terrarium - (2017) is detailed as ‘imagined lotus foot of the artist’s great-grandmother’. Looking again, I could see the carved outline of toenails. Not painting then, but painfully figurative.
By contrast, most of the work in Wonder Women is urgently present-tense, even if it registers echoes of tradition. While nothing is explicitly titled as a self-portrait, I’ll bet that many if not most of these artists used themselves as models. Men feature hardly anywhere;
a tone of introspection su¡uses the exhibition. (Its title, we are informed, is not a superhero reference but a nod to San Francisco-born Genny Lim’s poem ‘Wonder Woman’ (1981), in which she ponders the lives of diverse women around the world: ‘I look at them and wonder if / They are a part of me’.)
In Sasha Gordon’s stunning Mood Ring (2022), opalescent traces electrify a contemplative monochromatic female face. Jiab Prachakul’s Purpose (2022) is almost certainly a self-portrait, with the sitter’s bookshelf mirrored, inverted, behind her. A half-human, half-animal figure confronts a woman dressed in sweats in Shyama Golden’s The Passage (2022), one of a number of paintings that hints at the experience of a divided self. Another heady psychodrama in that vein, Four Sisters (2022) by Amanda Ba, is redolent of a Chinese-inflected Otto Dix.
A modest subsection of paintings samples traditional forms or techniques – from Hyegyeong Choi’s buttery tableau of women bathing in a stream, to Sahana Ramakrishnan’s sumptuous The End of Night (2022), in which a tiger tears at a man’s throat while lovers (and bears) frolic in the ornate clouds above. In such instances, there is almost always an attempt to hybridise obviously Asian references with contemporary Western motifs and concerns. One of the several very young artists in the show is Zoé Blue M., whose mangastyled ping-pong player (Spot Marked, Light Feet, 2022) also pays tribute to 1980s’ Pattern and Decoration painting.
Despite the scope and scale of Wonder Women, and the repetition of figure painting after figure painting, things never get boring. Particularly thrilling is an adumbral, twopanelled oil painting by Dominique Fung, Sea Women (2022), in which a spearfisherwoman is seen half above and half below the waterline. Another standout is Anna Park’s charcoalon-paper After You (2022), inspired, apparently, by the overturning earlier this year of Roe v. Wade. Grotesque male faces crowd round the supine form of a woman, their hands reaching up to grasp her.
As with many of the finest works in this exhibition, Fung and Park’s pictures are more formally inventive than thematically radical. Neither artist tries to illustrate the specific complexities of diasporic experience, but rather they draw on aspects of their multivalent, intersectional realities to reenergise a genre that, a decade ago, no one was betting on. For anyone exhausted by the current proliferation of mediocre figure painting, Wonder Women is a tonic.