BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
In the second show of the In Situ series we are excited to show Joy of Yesterday, from Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Xiangjie Rebecca Wu. These new paintings capture small moments of memory of Wu’s bitterness and freedom from her childhood living in rural China in a small town on the Yangzte river. Trivial objects and obscured figures create calm vignettes in oil painting for the viewer to ponder.
Her paintings provide you with the familiar to take you into her childhood memories. Despite the title these paintings are not just of warm nostalgic fondness. Wu uses cool muted tones to create a solemn mood and imagery that depicts childhood loss; not grave moments of trauma, but the small things that feel unjust to the innocent. The colors sit calmly on the canvas and put the viewer into the space to meditate on these moments of care and loss.
In each of Wu's paintings, there is a shard of tactility to gather. Something that you can grab onto with your own skin or eyes. Whether it is the feeling of cracking pistachios, pinching wontons or the bright light of a single bulb in a dark room, you can feel the objects in the work somewhere in the back of your mind. They dig deep into your own memories; who cannot envision the feeling of running hands along thin drapes or bare feet on a tile floor. Throughout the show, hands relay signs of fallibility, things are dropped and let go, the hands she does show seem to strain and quiver in exhaustion from maintaining their delicacy. Even the hands that are caring about their tasks falter and must let go. Rebecca Wu draws inspiration from the poet Louise Glück and in the final lines of her poem, The Garden, Wu’s pieces fall into place
“even here, even at the beginning of love,
her hand leaving his face makes
an image of departure
and they think
they are free to overlook
this sadness”
The poem draws sadness from even the budding of new love. She turns the moment of embrace of a young couple into a moment of loss as while she holds his face for a moment, it still must be pulled away. At the moment, they are ignorant to the fact that time is fleeting, yet it is. Wu parallels this fleeting romance and the inevitability of letting go to her own tightly held emotions of her past. Tender and melancholic memories intertwined are both meant to be forgotten as she continues to live.
