Soka Art is pleased to announce its group exhibition Placelessness on December 28th, presented by five artists: Fang Weiji, Tao Fa, Jagoda Mićović, Yuan Na, Anna NL Cheung, curated by Yuana, the exhibition will run until January 25, 2025.

“Placelessness” is a geographical phenomenon proposed by Edward Relph in his humanistic geography book Place and Placelessness: In the process of post-industrialization and the rapid expansion of consumer society, the significance of some diverse landscapes and important places is constantly decreasing or even disappearing, and they are gradually losing their original sense of place. Along with this, people have weakened their ability to recognize places and identities, and are lost in a maze of countless “similarities”. In this exhibition, five artists explore the boundaries and interweaving of different regional spaces in the context of “placelessness” from their own perspectives of understanding and expression.

Spreading Perceptual Space

Perceptual space is usually a “behavioral space based on people’s direct needs and practices”. In past experiences, people will project their own emotions and personality into it, creating a private and unique place. Fang Weiji’s Thoughts on a Quiet Night series of works, depicting the tranquil and beautiful flowers and plants in the night, interprets an aesthetic of transcendental emotions and philosophical thoughts, and is also the artist’s experience of objects from life. The daily tediousness and suffocation of the city have aggravated people’s inner anxiety and conflicts, so people tend to have the impulse to escape for a short time and begin to yearn for a peaceful land. For example, in their spare time, they appreciate the flowers and the moon, sit and watch the sunrise and sunset, and try to find a moment of peace and self in the thousands of landscapes. Fang Weiji uses elegant and harmonious colors, simple and clear composition to convey his immediate psychological state that transcends visual concepts. The branches standing under the moonlight involve a memory of looking up at the starry sky in childhood, then the past and the present seem to overlap. At this point, the perceptual space centered on the individual has been able to transcend the limits of time and become a more distant existence.

Insideness of Place Identity

“Home” is the basis of our identity and the dwelling place of being. People’s most primitive cognition and most personal feelings about a place come from this. Artist Tao Fa focuses his creation on his hometown, Yunnan, which is his most familiar and attachable place of belonging, where mountains and rivers nurtured his body, and where humanistic concepts shaped his personality. Tao Fa is used to letting his subconscious mind control the works freely in his creation, letting the paint flow wildly on the canvas, then constructing a mysterious world where all things are spiritual in the unconventional brushstrokes and the tone of traditional oriental colors. The scenes he paints are never silent but are always vibrant with illusions. In the work Thorny Mount Gui, the dilemma of thorns will not block the way, when the burning fire inside people is externalized and manifested, the silent guidance of the mountain god indicates to return home. At this moment, all the complexes and emotions have a place to go.

Obviously, every place in the world has its own uniqueness and recognition. When people leave their homes and arrive in an unfamiliar place, they are surrounded by completely different things and atmospheres, the imaginations that were previously based on pictures and words become real, and the resulting empathy produces different place identities. The work of Serbian artist Jagoda Mićović is inspired by the scenery of Jeju Island in South Korea. She visited the island as an “outsider” and saw the brilliant landscape on the island, such as colorful houses, black rocks and vast green forests. Jagoda came up with the idea of “making the landscape lose its color.” By reducing the high frequency of green, replacing the original colors of the landscape with grey to create a monochromatic view, and incorporating the contrast between the composition of the colorful houses and the white space that hints at the contours of the landscape, the work remains vivid and artistic. When the absence of primary colors makes the shape of the scenery sharp, gray also becomes “duality”, they become a game between light and shadow, day and night, flickering and stillness. As if the seasons had flipped, hot summer and snow coexisted here. Jagoda’s creations have taken Jeju Island away from those empty descriptions and traditional impressions, turning it into another kind of dreamy mystery, and have also created new perceptions and connections between people and places.

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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

--- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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Traveling in “Spacelessness”

With the frequent movement of people, the sense of belonging to a unique environment is gradually diluted or even stripped away. We travel around, stopping and looking at different corners of the world, experiencing encounters, separations and reunions over and over again. In this mode, a specific region is no longer a necessity of life, it becomes a choice of preference or not. Anna NL Cheung’s works are based on her experiences in the cities she has traveled to. She observes the uniqueness of each city with her own intuition, combines subtle color relationships with interlaced and twisted compositions and applies them to the scenes she sees. The homogenized social places like “airports” and “restaurants”, which directly refer to “spacelessness”, are temporarily extracted from the cold functional existence, unfolded and presented from a new perspective, full of refreshing, transparent and intriguing atmosphere. In the work The Airport – CD028, the travelers are scattered around waiting for their luggage, their inner world is not easy to be peeped into as hazy as their faces, as if no one can tell a city accurately and completely, the memories entwined with reality and falsehood will sink in the endless running until the end of the extension is not visible any more.

Trapped in the Drudgery of Place

If the constant movement makes people lost and doubtful, the restrictions of being trapped in one place for a long time will also bring depression and pain, so people begin to swing between the “tension of need and escape from home” to find a balance, and this state potentially affects people’s views on the relationship between “intimacy and alienation”. Yuan Na's work starts from herself, extracts ordinary images from daily life, strips off their “object properties”, and achieves a certain balance by showing the relative conflicts between them. The cut and reorganized geometric shapes in the work project the game of “light and dark”, and the soft fabric is broken by the orderly grid to remove the sense of pulling... These are like the balance of “alienation” on “intimacy” in a vacuum state. In fact, in an intimate relationship, emotion only plays a very small part. The artist tries to explore more possibilities related to it, such as the relationship between oneself and oneself, oneself and others or society, as well as the universe and dust, life and death, etc. If the “pursuit of balance” is regarded as a process rather than a predetermined result, those days of constant facing dullness will eventually lead one to break free from the confines of inner depression.