Amidst the buzz of the upcoming Armory Show, Amanda Ba’s new solo exhibition is set to open at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York from September 7 through October 26, 2024. Born in Ohio to first-generation Chinese-American parents, Ba’s work transforms diasporic memories and ideas of family heritage into otherworldly beauty, channeling nostalgia and imagination in equal breath.
For Developing Desire, Ba’s new paintings assembles a band of sensuous, goddess-like figures against Chinese metropolitan landscapes. The surrounding presence of rubble speaks to the impulses of creation, deconstruction, and reconstruction with nude bodies clad in knee pads and exhausted expressions. Bridging themes of desire, nationalism, and democracy, psychosexual fantasy takes on flesh form.
In other notable works, Ba guides visitors through sites of her childhood with retrospective iridescence. In “More Future Triptych”, the artist reflects on the first five years of her childhood spent in Hefei in Anhui Province. The three-channel video braids real and staged everyday scenes of public life to muse on China’s history, obsessions and desires as they manifest on the surface of the everyday.
From post-internet heart-shaped filters to Dazibao-inspired calligraphy, this upcoming exhibition seeks to observe China under a new light. With innate curiosity and inquisitive eye, Ba both captures and queries the country’s cultural consciousness as it rises to the surface.
Developing Desire will be on view in New York from September 7 through October 26, 2024.
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery
18 Wooster St,
New York, NY
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