Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 - Press Release

Fairs

Art Basel Miami Beach
2024

Henry Curchod
Michael Ho
Sydney Shen

Whispering Secrets to the Ocean’s Cave

Nova sector
Booth N5

Dates_ December 4–8, 2024
Venue_ Miami Beach Convention Center

Installation Views / Works / Press Release / Related Press

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present Whispering Secrets to the Ocean’s Cave for Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Nova sector, booth N5, featuring works by Henry Curchod, Michael Ho and Sydney Shen. The presentation delves into diasporic experiences, utilising the ethereal nature of materials to emulate the phantasmic presence of fleeting realities shaped by migration, boundaries, and power structures in the post-colonial context. Through an enigmatic series of paintings and installation, the booth cultivates as a temporary autonomous chamber–where stories and memories from distant lands, both personal and collective, reside; conjuring a sense of belongingness that never comes ashore.

Curchod’s art often traverses a knotty emotional register, rife with dissonance. Watch me fly (2024) pictures a striking moment as a boyish figure hurtles toward the unknown. This narrative resonance–where bodily intuition triumphs over the mind–carries over to Curchod’s mode of making, preserving a sense of immediacy and closeness to impulse found in the language of marks. In addition, the blaring, undulating saturations of red and yellow amplify the image’s sense of liberation to the brink of martyrdom and death. Pulsating with the same intensity, the work’s oscillating field of depth and perspective underscores Curchod’s retaliation against stagnation in his drawing practice. Like the boy with outstretched arms, the artist leaves his gestures open, allowing elementary feelings and tangential progressions of thought to ebb and flow in the open expanse of what lies beyond.

In We fall, along with our voices, into the abyss (2024), Curchod draws from personal memories of witnessing land-bound masses resonating to the other side. The textual flow of roughness and softness, rendered through charcoal streaks on oil stick and gouache, imbues the unvarnished surface with an innate intensity that belies the raw emotional pleas of those who stay ashore. As these echoes fade into ether, as fleetingly as swirls of the ship’s wake, Curchod draws the viewer into a sensibility that re-orients one’s awareness to the shifting horizons of life. Only movement is perpetual, as endings reveal to be beginnings on the other side of time and space. Keeping to its poetic sentiment, the work acts as a diaristic confession of the artist’s journey, allegorising his departure from the language of painting as he navigates in a steady transition toward drawing within his practice.

Terrestrial to Celestial (2024) extends on the enduring motifs that appeared in Ho’s earlier paintings, notably the Heirloom Seal of the Realm–an imperial seal crafted during the Qin Dynasty to unify China, lost throughout history and preserved only as a myth. In this painting, the mythical object is half-sunken in a body of water. Contrasting its visceral depiction, the scene is illumined by pale lilac hues and dusty scatters of black, evoking dreamlike and fantastical qualities that the myth draws upon. Here, Ho likens the heirloom object to a remnant of lineage and a symbol of intergenerational passage, now dispossessed in a liminal realm where remembrance and forgetfulness fluidly coexist. Forged further through an interplay of paint across both sides of the canvas, Ho’s painting suggests a sedimentation of experience and the ever-evolving merger of passing moments, generations and lifetimes.

Ideas around the Asian diasporic experience are at the heart of Ho’s practice. In his recent paintings, Ho focuses on environments and artifacts drawn from mythological descriptions to embrace questions of belonging and rootedness within the context of mixed culture heritage. Hunting in a Dream of Summer (2024) presents an imaginary landscape of mountains and meandering waters, influenced by the sensibilities of Chinese landscape painting (山水, shanshui) and Western Impressionism. The painting delineates the artist’s abstract reimagining and ideals of a promised homeland defined not by geography, but by constant exchange, movement, and displacement. At the same time, Ho approaches the canvas as a contemplative medium, employing the technique of “reverse painting” to create circulatory, interwoven relationships between layers of paint. As his materials engage in a fluid, slippery transversal of borders, Ho alludes this doubleness and in-betweenness to the plurality and dispersal of self, identity and belonging inherent in the diasporic experience.

Timor Mortis Conturbat Me (2017) by Sydney Shen consists of a round shape CNC woodcut panel painted by the artist to imitate a metal manhole cover on the ground with star anises scattered on top. Its translation meaning “The Fear of Death Disturbs Me” is a common refrain found in English and Scottish medieval poetry. The work itself and the scent around it allude directly to a folk cure for the Black Death, which advised sitting in an open sewer. This method was believed to expel the “bad air” causing illness by luring it to merge with the “bad air” of other human waste in the sewer. This confounding method of curing oneself is just one of the many bizarre remedies humans have invented when gripped by the fear of death. Shen invites folklore and historical context in this work by adopting the smell of star anises which were widely used to prevent illness in medieval times. The misbelief in its octagon shape to bring prosperity drew people to the delusion of a better being. Lacking access to adequate healthcare, people have no choice but to take fate into their own hands with belief in superstitious and sometimes harmful ideologies. Under this immense pressure, whether these cures actually improved their health or brought any comfort ceased to matter. The fear of death was so pervasive, so profoundly disturbing, that any action became a cure for that stress. Through the appropriation of the Latin line, Shen enchants the mundane object into a symbolic passageway of hope. The manhole lid that is laying on the ground calls out the will to survive from the other end of life.