NYC - September 6-11, 2023
Spring/Break Art Show NYC: Booth 1125, 625 Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Installation View of “Transformation Sequence”
Installation View of “Transformation Sequence”
Transformation Sequence is a curatorial project featuring five East Asian femme artists practicing in the United States. Inspired by Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and other 90s magical girl anime, these artists’ works address questions of identity, alter ego, and subtle shifts in interpretation through a feminine lens, each bringing their own personally informed point of view.
The transformation sequence is a key moment in the magical girl genre which represents the culmination of the heroine’s double identity. In a flash of light and a whirl of colors, she changes from an ordinary girl to a superpowered, hyperfeminine warrior princess. Her outfit becomes frilly and covered with gems, and she wields a sparkling magic weapon. This is the moment when fact and fiction merge, and the persona takes the wheel, ready to kick ass. Though there are parallels in Western media such as Wonder Woman and Disney princess movies, the canonical transformation sequences belong to the Sailor Scouts from Sailor Moon. Here, the protagonists rely on the strength of their friendship and form an unconventional family while working together to defeat sinister villains.
Inventing themselves through their secret lives, these magical girls show how we can write our own narratives in which true power comes from the cosmic energy suffusing our surroundings. Likewise, the equally magical artists in Transformation Sequence reach into their personal and cultural histories for inspiration, turning unconsidered everyday scenarios into the basis for their unique mythos and staking a claim for the realities they are forging. Yen Yen Chou explores the pluripotent natural world, putting an optimist’s spin on its constant flux. Fuko Ito plumbs the depths of strong emotions in her forgiving plush environments. Christina Yuna Ko reclaims Asian “cute culture” as a unifying diasporic language. Jeannie Rhyu uses light and motion to depict the mutability of feminine expression. Huidi Xiang creates unpredictable sculptural installations that examine the labor cost of pop cultural fantasies. In the name of the moon, the planets, and the stars, these artists transform their sources of inspiration into expressive and fantastical artwork.
Yen Yen Chou, “Swirly Scoops,” 2023, Watercolor and gouache on Arches paper, 10 x 14 in.
Yen Yen Chou explores ideas of transformation and the relationship between humans and nature, particularly the concept that everything has the potential to become something else and obtain a new life or meaning. Using images taken from everyday life as a starting point and recontextualizing motifs such as clouds, raindrops, flowers, and mushrooms, Yen Yen creates a whimsical and magical world of fleeting moments, whether they are sweet or bitter, clear or ambiguous.
Yen Yen Chou is an artist based in Taipei, Taiwan and Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Pratt Institute with an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing in 2018. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions at spaces including Dinner Gallery, New York, NY, Fridman Gallery, New York, NY; Tchotchke Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY; Chinatown Soup, New York, NY; Gallery Cubed, New York, NY; Prince Street Gallery, New York; and SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC.
Fuko Ito, “perennial’s cradle ~ rejuvenation in Isolation,” 2021, Watercolor and colored pencil on paper, 10 x 14 in.
Fuko Ito portrays naked, vulnerable creatures called fumblys in their plushy ecosystem. fumblys fill their infinite ecosystem with plush to save themselves from the collapse, fall, and heartache they experience from living among themselves. Plush is a texture that is both soft yet firm — it is able to absorb trauma and mend itself back into shape. Fuko imagines our hearts and emotional capacities to have the same visceral effect of being bruised and healed like plush.
Fuko Ito was born and raised in Kobe, Japan where she grew her love for storytelling through reading books and comics. She moved to the US to study printmaking and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her BFA and the University of Kansas for her MFA. She currently resides and works in Lexington, KY as Assistant Professor of Foundations Drawing/Art Studio at the University of Kentucky. Fuko’s creative practice in storytelling reflects on personal and collective experiences of coping, forgiving, and mending interpersonal fissures. She is driven to make images that imagine a softer and more compassionate world while reflecting on the social implications and struggles.
Christina Yuna Ko, various works, installation view, 2023, Acrylic on wood panel
Christina Yuna Ko demarcates a visual lexicon that reflects the cultural inheritance of Korean American experience. Situated within a Western context and entangled within cross-cultural histories, this lexicon becomes an amalgam of “cute culture,” imported cultural artifacts, generational practices, and domestic wares. Using the palette and “flatness” present in cute iconography, Christina explores the way cuteness as an aesthetic category proliferates in the daily life of the diaspora, prevalent in everything from utilitarian goods to pop culture and everyday necessities.
Christina Yuna Ko is a Korean American artist living and working in Queens, NY. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and will be starting the Columbia University MFA program in Fall 2023. She previously exhibited her work in Los Angeles, CA, Washington D.C., and in and around NYC. Selected exhibitions include shows at One River Gallery, Woodbury, NY; Perrotin, New York, NY; Selenas Mountain, Brooklyn, NY; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY; Dinner Gallery, New York, NY; Chelsea Market, New York, NY; Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Wave Hill, Bronx, NY.
Jeannie Rhyu, “Celebration Pie,” 2023, Oil on canvas, 11 x 14 in.
Jeannie Rhyu explores her emotional impressions of reality as she reinterprets her cultural visual traditions in paintings and monoprints. She paints inspired by history, folklore, rituals, fairy tales, and transcultural femininity, as well as the magic of memories. Jeannie is especially fascinated by the mutability of natural elements like light, fire, and water, and how they find a place in ritual practice. She merges the traditional and the contemporary to assemble colorful realms that float between surrealism, folklore, and dreams.
Jeannie Rhyu is a Korean Canadian artist living and working in Queens, New York. She graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally in shows in New York, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Seoul, Beijing, and London. Selected exhibitions include shows at The Border Gallery (New York), Seefood Room (Hong Kong), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York), Shin Gallery (New York), Field Projects and Tutu Gallery (New York), and Leroy Neiman Gallery (New York). She has given artist talks at Columbia University and for community-based organizations.
Huidi Xiang, “mary metamorphoses,” 2023, 3D printed PLA, resin, step ladder, 14 x 10 x 52 in.
Huidi Xiang makes sculptural objects, installations, and systems to convolute pop cultural products and phenomena, remixing, recontextualizing, and transforming symbols and scenarios of popular media to construct alternative forms and narratives of late capitalism. With her work, she closely observes, records, transcribes, and translates the landscapes of contemporary society. With a cute yet crude sculptural gesture, Huidi’s work ruptures the singular storytelling, revealing the contradiction, joy, tragedy, and absurdity inherent in the making of ideology.
Huidi Xiang is a sculptor born in Chengdu, China, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Huidi received her MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 and her BA in Architecture and Studio Art from Rice University in 2018. Huidi’s works have been exhibited internationally, including OCAT Biennale (Shenzhen, China), KAJE (Brooklyn, NY), Lydian Stater (Long Island City, NY), Tutu Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), LATITUDE Gallery (New York, NY), Contemporary Calgary (Calgary, Canada), and more. Huidi has also participated in many residencies, including NARS Foundation International Residency Program, ACRE Residency Program, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is currently an AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
