KANGI, CONNIE WANG: FLOATING IN THE FLOWS
to
Z Gallery Arts 102-1688 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V6J 1G1
Kangi, Connie Wang, "Rewinding," 2018
Artist Reception: Thursday, March 28, 2019, 6 PM - 8 PM
Floating In The Flows
Kangi Connie Wang’s practice includes the use of synesthesia, a sound to colour experience that is a translation of another dimension. It is not the core of the work, yet acts as a tool towards an intuitive process building itself out of additive gestures. Born in China, she was raised within an eastern environment for nineteen years before moving to Canada. This context has developed into a practice based around using western materiality, mainly oil paint, to evolve traditional eastern aesthetics. Some of Connie’s influences include traditional ink painting and calligraphy. She translates this into loose confident gestures, fluid brush marks and interest with black and white focused colour schemes. The newest works in her solo show Floating in the Flows incorporate materials such as pastels, spray paint and cutouts, continuing to push forward the realm of her painting and forcing unexpected moments to occur in the works.
Like many young artists, Connie looks toward the question, “ what is painting in this contemporary context?” and seeks to explore this question through the western eastern dialectic. The work takes on a conversation of contrasts, as thick and heavy black marks debate with white flat backgrounds, or negative space speaks against dense and deep impastos. Moments of emptiness are disrupted by motion and sketchy, swift gestures moving through the surface. This upheaval of colliding texture and painted surface enforce the conversed distinction of divided aesthetics which rebel and reconcile on the picture plane in an abstract space. The motion of the gestures, the continuation of flow and endless movement recall the Eastern aesthetic and produce dynamic images untethered to temporal limits. Contrasted against an abundance of texture, and sometimes viscerally satisfying applications of oil paints ground the paintings in a universal material abstraction, ambivalent to context and of a floating aesthetic. Kangi Connie Wang’s work is a compromise of pulling forces and a reflection of her ideologies, at their visual cores.