Wendy Wei & Edmund Bao: Fleeting Hues of Passage

Opening Reception: Jan 24, 2025, 6-8pm

Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456 is pleased to present Wendy Wei & Edmund Bao: Fleeting Hues of Passage, on view from January 24, 2025, through February 7, 2025.

Exhibition Statement

How should you envision the vestiges of migration? As an unfolding experience, the passage of migration disrupts and makes visible the calcified assumption of a typically linear timeline. The spatial and temporal alterations of migration render a peculiar vision that is often too opaque to be effable—it juxtaposes “now” and “then”, “here” and “there”, “you” and “us”, where you can only inhabit two worlds simultaneously yet within each, you are total strangers.

The homeland, extending its gaze from the hazy past, becomes our sensuous archive that persistently reconfiguring the present. Wendy Wei and Edmund Bao, both as Chinese diasporic visual artists, intuit sophisticated visibility through their gentle, careful remaking of the “past”. Attuned to the uncanny moments concealed in the fading shadows of our memories, Wendy and Edmund craft a perception of “past” beyond mere symbolism attached to objects, instead as an open terrain performed through textures and lines, blending colors and melting contours.

In Wendy’s work, crosshatched opaque watercolor seems to mimic a weaving texture or flickering old TV screens; multiple mediums are almost crowdedly, densely layered together, forming an overwhelming dreamscape, from which we cannot evade yet to which we have never ventured. Edmund, with improvisational moves of acrylic and charcoal on raw canvas, sketches out a playground for emerging gestures, movements, and visages. Restless confrontations come forth in the much-suspended, alternative sequence of rituals and practices.

Fleeting Hues of Passage is set to exhibit during Chinese New Year’s Eve, a time traditionally meant for people to be “together,” yet in this context, it becomes more specifically about being “alone together” at this remote, alternative “home”—New York City. Why are we here? How shall we feel? This exhibition is thus a wishful invitation for us to venture into this uncanny space, with elusive traces of the past and ongoing selves, through every keen and discerning gaze.

Please contact info@caacarts.org for more information.