Feeling with David Wang

Gallery 456 is pleased to present Feeling, a two-person exhibition featuring Phyllis Yao and David Wang. Through their work and the act of creating, Phyllis and David reflect and react to their physical worlds. The artworks reveal emotions that arise from their memories and experiences.

Wang’s landscape reliefs are mementos of his cherished personal experiences and adventures. With sincerity, he enshrines memories of irreplaceable beauty. True beauty, Wang believes, is not easy to come by. It is unexpected, impermanent, and even secretive. His landscapes are both refutations against the flattened visual world of industrial stimuli, and reminders of the wonders to be found in private and unseen moments. They are commemorations of things that bloom briefly but deeply. His figurative reliefs are the souls which inhabit his world. Surrounded by their own private starry night, these beings are both mindful and playful. They are free and full of feeling. Like his landscapes, they are self portraits — windows into an interior world.

Yao’s paintings reflect anxieties in her present and the irrational paranoia, insanity, anger and coping that emerges to protect herself. In them she grapples with the loss of the sense of self in isolation and mulls on financial stresses. Through creating self portraits Yao acts out, and is forced into, uncomfortable and lonely situations in-which she shares with the viewer and even asks for their help. The muted, dark and pale colors build isolating, sickly environments. Yao chooses carefully what to render, distort and build with fibers, to create emotionally charged works that are specifically eerie, nervous and jealous.