Collection: Bounce House

Curator Statement:

As a kid growing up in LA, family trips to Chinatown weren't too different than trips to an amusement park. They were colorful, adventurous, and sometimes even just slightly dangerous enough to be exciting. Roaming the stalls at the strip malls allowed my tiny, undeveloped child brain to wander and my favorite activity became looking at all the bootleg merch of my favorite cartoons. Everything was the wrong color, mirrored, distorted or manipulated in a way that brought sort of a playful, dark humor to the content it was displaying. The marriage between Diane’s and Ingrid’s work creates an environment where this feeling runs rampant. Like a playground structure, they’re colorful and intuitive to enter. But when approached from a different angle, portals emerge allowing entry into a world that can be simultaneously comforting yet unsettling in its design. Within Ingrid’s work, lines and forms stretch and compress, forcing your eyes to move all over as if you were looking at several different security monitors at the same time. Different parts of her paintings demand your attention one after another and you can’t help but notice the careful layering and attention to edges that create this effect. Diane’s work operates similarly, but instead of windows, the paintings feel like they wrap around your skull taking space within your peripheral vision. You can’t help but feel like you fell into them, maybe before you even realize. Together, the work violently bounces around and against each other. And while the bouncing has a certain aggressiveness, the work of each of these artists’ is ultimately and unintentionally lifted by their respective desires for attention.

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Ingrid Yi-Chen Lu  陸 宜 辰  (b.2000 Taipei, Taiwan) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently an MFA candidate at Pratt Institute. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons. In her interdisciplinary practice, she builds a personal world by weaving together paintings, drawings, ceramics, and textiles. Her works have been shown in New York and Taipei. Recent shows include National Arts Club, New York, NY; LATITUDE Gallery, New York, NY; Off-Site Art, Taipei, Taiwan.

Website: https://ingridyichenlu.com/
Instagram: @ingridluuuu @menuobjects

Diane Zhou • 周葭葭 is an artist that lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She uses paintings, sculptures, and screens to flesh out the emergent world of kimokawaii diasporic dystopian horror. She hoards cartoon patterned fabrics and plastic toys born in Chinese factories, and combines them with painted imagery and hand sculpted objects such as teeth, eyes, and tongues, creating a collision of expectations between the human that seeks comfort from these objects, and the tenacity of the objects themselves.

Website: https://dianezhou.com/
Instagram: @monkeymittens

Ray Hwang (b. 1992) is an artist from Los Angeles, currently living and working out of Ridgewood, NY. His work consists primarily of acrylic painting and drawing, in which he uses recurring motifs from throughout his personal history to explore themes of family, home and inter-cultural contradiction. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and has participated in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and internationally. He has been featured most recently with Art Maze Magazine, Vast Magazine, and is a Keyholder at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York. He has also attended the Plum Lime Residency (Brooklyn, NY) and the Moosey Residency (Norwich, UK). He has shown recently with Tube Culture Hall (Milan, Italy), Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Bonian Space (Beijing, China), and LaiSun Keane Gallery (Boston, MA). He opened his first solo exhibition in New York in 2023 with Latitude Gallery (New York, NY).

Website: www.rayhwangart.com
Instagram: @rayhwangart

Bounce House