Siegfried Contemporary is pleased to announce “Eclectic Dreamers” featuring paintings by three emerging international artists who recently graduated from Slade School of Fine Art.
Ching-Yuk Jade NG, Madeleine Roger-Lacan and Faye Wei Wei are brought together in this show due to their shared fascination with dreams as a way of pushing the boundaries of their realities and challenging their imagination. In their paintings the distinctions between dream and life, fiction and reality become blurred. The surreal aspect within their work engages the viewer in an exploration into subconscious.
Ching-Yuk Jade NG is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in China and currently lives and works in London. Her work is largely inspired by her travels to various obscure places. The fading memories of her trips and the material she gathered on her journeys are the source of her paintings. Her interest lies in deconstructing symbolism within real life events and make them part of her fictions. Within the scale of her paintings she focuses on very detailed intricate patterns that create a background for elaborate dreamlike scenery inspired by Western as well as Asian traditions. The contrast between small and large generates a delusion and blurs the difference between truth and fantasy.
Madeleine Roger-Lacan is a French artist and student at the École des Beaux-Arts who recently moved to London to complete an exchange course at the Slade School of Fine Art. Always working in a very instinctive way, her subject is informed by her experiences, her dreams and what she absorbs from the environment around her. In her paintings she places those elements together in order to embrace reality and maximise it. In this sense her work can be seen as autobiographical. Her paintings are characterized by humor, close framing and a use of symbols from daily life and popular culture. While living in Paris her paintings played with the idea of having a choice between showing or hiding, presence and absence. Her move to London encouraged her to push the boundaries of her imagination further.
Faye Wei Wei was born and lives in South London. For her, painting is a performative and physical process since her body is what defines the limits of the images she creates. By placing her figures in different levels between the for- and the background her paintings acquire a strange depth where the drawing floats above the abstract marks playing with sparseness and restraint. Strange childlike faces together with subtle marks, and symbols sit within a complex compositional structure and give her work a sense of surreal lightness. In her paintings she creates a reality that oscillates between the strange and the familiar.
