Garden of Reveries

Garden of Reveries
Exhibition in our gallery space curated by Ingrid Liu
Opening January 13th from 6-9 pm, Exhibition through January 15th

Meet Ingrid Liu

“This curating experience is very unique, the responsibility of the whole process has to fall on me has really pushed me to discover some of my potentials, it’s a heavy project, but it’s also so rewarding to see the results”

Curatorial statement

Garden of Reveries brings together paintings, sculptures, and interactive devices to present the idea of a miniature utopia where the bodies are reimagined to narrate an experiential tale, a supposedly garden of freedom, which invites us to indulge in such delight, only to find it filled with ever so slight discomfort. Here, we are confronted with the notions of normality and rules constructed by the society that we are so accustomed to, but only to find them become constrained for ourselves

“They make of this body a fragment of imaginary space, which will communicate with the universe of divinities, or with the universe of the other.” Michel Foucault proposed the idea of an “utopian body”. A body is considered as a place that we inhabit and are forever limited by its every configuration. A utopian body is one that rejects our own body, and let our own spirituality take back the sovereignty of our bodies. It pushes us to contemplate the question of our own existence, how the body becomes limiting for our mind in the relationships we are in.

This exhibition goes from realising the limitations of the body, society as a tool for determining the normality of the body's boundaries, to the discovery of intrinsic power dynamics within the societal relationships and call on people's spirituality to regain the physical freedom constraint by the social rules. The exhibition explores the possibility of freeing the body from these appearances, to scrutinize the socially constructed views on normality and embody the hidden deformity within relationships, thus bypassing the norm, and ultimately breaking away from anthropocentrism.

Wang Yu’s acrylic paintings of angel bodies confronts the audience with the irreducible beauty of our own condition, the superhuman flesh created on her canvas are of no real shape but still have a corporal density that give a mysterious presence. Pier Sparta creates figurative sculptures that link the physical spaces with surrounding environments to express a spiritual realm where is dreamlike. Exploring the hidden violence in social relationships, Mao Yuqiu’s game devices imagine a virtual authority that attempts to satisfy an ordinary character’s petty desire for power, and the fundamental silliness and the absurdity of these devices’s functionality aims only for futility.

Artist Bios :

Pier Sparta

Coming from Dijon, Pier Sparta is a Paris based artist specialising in sculptures. From 2017 to 2021, Pier studied at both DNA Beaux-Arts de Paris, atelier Jean-Marc Bustamante and DNSEP Beaux-Arts de Paris, atelier Tatiana Trouvé, and has been in multiple exhibitions in Paris and around France.

Pier’s sculptures, often figurative of familiar figures, try to explore early narratives which drew inspiration from prehistory and the Middle Age, also referencing arte povera, minimalism and popular culture. He takes on themes from human relationships, nature and art historical forms, and uses human expression as his language to quest narration freely. For Pier, figurative sculpture is a way to evoke the human being in his psyche and his physical space linked to the environments he crosses, by crafting and moulding, he lodges the spirit to the matter of his works. Throughout the years, his works have been developing in the manner of a repertoire of characters constituting a sort of family at once recomposed and decomposed. A form of interdependence was established between the sculptures. This gave rise to continuous and discontinuous narratives inscribed in an idea of time and duration and thus carrying in them a constant preoccupation with life and death. 

Follen Head, 2020, Pier Sparta

Table, Mao Yuqiu

Mao Yuqiu

Graduated from Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in September 2022, Mao Yuqiu’s works are primarily consisted of installations and Bande Dessinée. Her works has been exhibited in group shows in Asia, Europe and the US since 2015, and she just had her first solo exhibition Looking for a family member today in Leipzig, Germany in November, 2022.

Being interested in the violence generated by mutual games in interpersonal communication, Yuqiu wishes to concretize the abstract relationship by turning them into something that can be adjusted and displayed through various methods and even various tools. The cowardice and arrogance of human amplified in the story of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Erostrat and the story of Roi Ubu is the main influence for her works, which inspires her to ask questions through her work about the incomprehensible actions she observed in life. She used comics as the primary media to record her ideas, then she expands these ideas through installation works and uses them to solve a certain dilemma in life scenes or to help users create new connections with others.

Wang Yu

Born June 9, 1973 in Jiangsu, China, Wang Yu has been living and working in Paris since 2001. In 2003, she graduated from DEA in Plastic Arts (University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne). Wang Yu has had exhibitions in major cities like Paris, Hong Kong, Beijing, Milan and Shanghai and also in other cities in China, France, USA and Australia.

Wang Yu’s painting practice is driven by the human mystery to seek out this flesh and what lies beneath it. In 2007, she embarked on a process to find translucent, thick and palpable flesh that “lives” on the canvas. After much experimentation in composing acrylic mediums and varnishes, in 2012 she gained the invaluable support of a major American paint manufacturer - Golden Artistes Colors - who developed a bespoke skin tone medium for her. In the first stage of this process, she works at length on the sketch of her characters in oil, in a very stripped down way, close to a pastel rendering. Then the second step is to run this medium over their bodies; after drying, the figures appear as soft, translucent, satiny flesh, almost shiny on the canvas.