Antenna Space is pleased to announce our participation at Art Basel Miami 2024, featuring the works by artists Owen Fu, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Mire Lee, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Zhou Siwei at booth D27.

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Art Basel Miami Beach  2024

Booth｜D27

VIP Preview: 2024/12/04-12/05

Public Days: 2024/12/06-12/08

Venue:  1901 Convention Center Drive Miami Beach, FL 33139

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In the context of Evelyn Taocheng Wang, techniques and anecdotes, texts and images from ancient and modern China and abroad are all at her fingertips, and through multi-layered superimposition, the richly-detailed images bring about an enjoyable experience, as if she were strolling around, moving between the overall experience of the mixing of cultures, identities, and classes. The work It was not normal intercepts a mundane encounter in life, the intimate care between foreign women, the private female routine, is presented in the artist’s bright images, the bilingual title of which is poorly worded, intending to break through the cultural barriers created by rational sequences through the inherent naiveté. Another piece of Evelyn Taocheng Wang ‘s classic Agnes Martin series intervenes in the rigorous and abstract banded color strips with figurative schema, stripping away simple tracing and appropriation, the artist convenes aesthetic generalization in the vacuum of multiple experiences, while the handwriting in the corner once again hints at subtle misunderstandings brought about by cultural differences, and the reality of the world’s fissures appears to be dynamic and gentle under the artist’s teasing.

In Mire Lee ‘s Open Wound series, the fabrics hanging from the ceiling on metal chains are described as “skin”. The chain suspension form is inspired by the baths used by coal miners in the early days of communal cleaning facilities, where miners hung their garments from the ceiling of the bathroom during their factory labor and at home during their rest periods. The rigidity and flexibility clearly express the process of production and decay that seems to have begun to play out under the impetus of machines and human hands. The complex history of industry is awe-inspiring for its relentless violence and scale. These open wounds may make you feel the transformation between disgust to sympathy, fear to love. It is therefore ambivalent emotions that explore the thresholds and transformations of man and machine, soft and hard, inside and outside, individual and collective. The “skin” of these open wounds suggests the dissolved or plastic body, and illustrates the common nature of our corporeal existence.

In Stanislava‘s latest series, she attempts to paint on discarded Prussian clock dials, removed from 19th-century observation towers, often discarded for their lack of hands and recycled by antique dealers, in which the center of the dial, where the hands used to be mounted, has become a peephole, pierced by a symbolic penis. The enamel on the dial’s surface has crumbled and flaked over time, revealing rusted copper, and the vaguely enameled surface has an absorbent and velvety texture, like a hungry womb devouring the pigment. The German cultural system and conservatism represented by Prussia, is a controlling and jealous lover for Stanislava. Time expands and contracts in different bodies, and the two propositions present an interactive tension in the artist’s strange use of media, in order not to fall under the compulsion of time or sexuality, but to retrieve the self, longing, resistance and ambition from the escapist present or the sadness of history. The artist explores the boundaries of the search for power and intimacy in the empirical representation of his works.

Owen explains the image of the work “Untitled (just the way you are)” as “The Sorrows of a Boy”. A boy blooming with flowers, tangled and bound by visible cords. The struggles of adolescence, the unspoken sorrows, a hint of insecurity, a touch of confusion. The painted face mirrors your expression, both then and now, carries the same quiet resignation. It is through this portrait of a face that the artist tells us, “no flower blooms forever. All troubles will eventually pass. No matter what others say, you are just the way you are.”

Zhou Siwei‘s works incorporate symbolic references ranging from the visual to the cultural, making everyday objects and symbols seem both familiar and unfamiliar, a translation of the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life. His “Cover” series of painted objects, which use organic materials such as PLA5 and inscribe personal messages or slogans on them, are steeped in the seemingly intimate interactions between electronic devices and their users, as if the artist were presenting us with an ever-changing and alien environment. Centered around the theme of “Apple”, the work “Apple 05 (Ten CNY for 1.5kg)” is placed in a seemingly purple field, presenting images of apples collected from all over the world, from classic still-life paintings of apples to Apple logos on consumer products, in which the images slowly but directly interact with the viewer’s vision. The images play with the viewer’s visual experience in a slow but direct manner. Painter (mini) is a symbolic image of a young artist, inspired by Willendorf’s Venus, depicting a small or fledgling “painter” full of life.

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Image and text courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space