PabePabe Exhibition: Amy Tong + Wu Jiaru - Pick A Card at PabePabe featured in daoju art, reviewed by Hou Lam Tsui.
In my view, what Tong and Wu ask in Pick A Card is grand and ambitious: it probes the push and pull between reenchantment and disenchantment, the links between witchcraft/enchantment and the unconscious, and the task of redefining what counts as canon and what is cast as heresy. For the third time, accessories brand PabePabe has transformed its shop into a gallery space, presenting the duo exhibition Pick A Card this February, featuring a series of oil paintings and acrylic works. Both artists’ new paintings are vertically oriented and relatively small—like tarot cards—portals to inner and outer worlds that sketch the emotional collapses of a post-Anthropocene condition: of the self, the secular, faith, intimacy, and estrangement. This collapse is not showy; it is even calm and quiet, compressing an instant of breaking into a small frame. The exhibition space is painted in green-screen green, allowing viewers to use virtual reality (VR) and chroma key to “transfer” these painted cards into another dimension, where they hover in an ambiguous, glittering time-space. Here, the green screen functions as an almost pure concept: participation and photo-taking are not the artists’ primary concern; rather, they long to construct a suspended, fictional dimension.
Wu Jiaru’s series Grandma’s Twelve Lovers returns to her engagement with artificial intelligence and extends it into a consideration of the relationship between creation and creator: God makes humans in His own image, and humans likewise make AI in theirs. Wu creates a near-divine virtual female figure and conducts a kind of future archaeology of a quasi-human species, presenting a tradition in which “humans depend on women/the maternal body for reproduction.” Her twelve lovers recall Jesus’s twelve disciples; Wu attempts to build a new tradition close to scripture while overturning what is taken as canon—namely, a male-centered worldview. Within the series, viii stands out: figuration is deliberately outlined with abstract lines; the palette is pared down yet vivid. With long, slick brushstrokes, the artist blurs gender, making it difficult to distinguish female from male in the goddess and her lovers.
The exhibition begins with an imagination opened through divination, giving both Tong and Wu a textured framework for their respective painterly concerns. All the works shown are accented with green-screen pigment, echoing the green-screen-colored exhibition space and inviting the idea that what unfolds inside the paintings might link up with the real world outside the frame. In this way, Pick A Card shapes a passage like an “Anywhere Door,” opening possibilities for tracing, imagining, and juxtaposing. Here, viewers move between the worlds inside and outside the image—and the liquid, in-between spaces they contain.
Text translated from original in Chinese. Courtesy of Hou Lam Tsui and daoju art.
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