Amanda Ba, born in Ohio from first generation Chinese American parents, has long been influenced by diasporic memories and her family heritage. In her latest works, Ba observes China from a different perspective, seeking to capture the country’s cultural consciousness and interrogate its formation.
The exhibition Developing Desire is now on view at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery New York location until October 26, 2024. The show features new paintings, a three-channel video and her first foray into installation.
While working on the exhibition, Ba traveled to Hefei in Anhui Province, the city where she spent the first five years of her life and still maintains family connections. The raw footage she filmed while observing the city, the paradoxes of its booming real estate developments and its residents’ daily lives, comprises More Future Triptych (2024).
This three-channel video, made in collaboration with Ba’s partner Justine Cheng, combines real and staged everyday scenes of public life to explore China’s history, obsessions and desires as they manifest on the surface of the country’s reality. “China’s fantasy of the world. The World’s fantasy of China,” says the voiceover, “What does it mean to desire the world? Can what is given be refused?”
Echoing the perennial and ever growing construction sites captured in the video, a billboard composed of sixteen paintings will rise in the main gallery space. Mimicking a post-internet heart-shaped collage filter, this mosaic of portraits seem to speak of the personal dreams and professional hopes of the young generation. The resulting effect mixes elements of socialist realism, pop art and advertising.
The back of the billboard features wheatpasted drawings that appropriate the Dazibao handwritten posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. For these calligraphic drawings, Ba worked collaboratively with other contributors in a manner that is similar to graffiti writing, embracing the democratic nature of public text.
On the gallery’s walls, Ba’s new paintings feature goddess-like, oversized nude figures, their sensuous, otherworldly flesh often appearing against or inhabiting Chinese metropolitan landscapes: the Huangpu river in central Shanghai, the city’s iconic highway interchanges, the ruins of redeveloped office and apartment complexes.
These works seem to expose psychosexual fantasies, drawing unexpected connections between ideas of desire, libido, capital, nationalism, and democracy. Rubble is another recurring motif in Ba’s new paintings, appearing as the signifier for the impulses that propel the repeated acts of construction, destruction and reconstruction to which the exhibition bears witness.
Installation images by: Genevieve Hanson.
About the Artist
Amanda Ba was born in 1998 in Columbus, Ohio, and currently lives and works in New York City. She studied Visual Arts and Art History at Columbia University in New York and Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her work was included in Wonder Women, curated by Kathy Huang at Jeffrey Deitch in New York and Los Angeles, and 100 Years, an exhibition organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Gagosian in Miami’s Design District, both in 2022. Developing Desire is Ba’s first solo show in New York.
Developing Desire is on view until October 26, 2024 at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery located at 18 Wooster Street in New York City
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