Jiaming You: Looking Out
Through her new paintings, Jiaming You is looking out from herself at a place which features mostly solitary figures in flux as if being teleported within their surroundings, somewhere among star-filled night skies between the urban and verdant. Part of, while also lost in, the actual space itself, these beings appear to be looking for something beyond. But what? Or even who? And why are their heads obscured, facing away, bodies turned from the viewer?
Perhaps the answers lie in the deceptively simple title of this show, a gerund directing onlookers to use not only their eyes but also their hearts. For the artist, the act of observing also becomes a compassionate gesture that espouses a sort of painterly Confucianism. Looking out then for each other and our world, to be kinder, less selfish instead of the proverbial “me” in constant self-centered need for attention.
Far from the madding crowd, You rejects the Warholian notion of celebrity, the so-called “fifteen minutes of fame” coveted by social media influencers to embrace selflessness. What we see now is decidedly anti-selfie, the opposite of Facebook narcissism whereby foreground and background now merge into each individual, disrupting their yin and yang balance for the sake of betterment and harmony no longer just about themselves.
Which become her analects to ask what are we perceiving and how we are perceived.
Photo credit: Mikey Mosher