ESLITE GALLLERY Beijing announces that Kristycharay’s first solo exhibition in Beijing will be held from December 21, 2024 to January 19, 2025, displaying her latest works from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition centers around a series of self-portraits that date back to 2000, highlighting the evolution of Kristycharay’s style and her emotional depth, with some works making their debut. It will also feature a series of portraits and distinctive toy images, putting together a comprehensive experience for art enthusiasts to appreciate her works.
With her unique artistic language and vivid expression techniques, Kristycharay has not only garnered high acclaims in the academic community, but also won sustained attention from the public. Skilled in painting and music since childhood, she created mature works in high school. Looking back on her teenage years, she recalls that she worked hard in both high school and college. In the 1980s, she left Taiwan to study in New York. Having graduated from the Masters School and the School of Art at the Cooper Union, she received a master’s degree from the School of Arts of Columbia University. Initially, drawing was her way of coping with language barriers and loneliness. Her teachers also encouraged her to leverage her strengths, leading her to take drawing classes. These efforts eventually translated into the unique personal style in her works and the ability to break through creative bottlenecks. In the sophomore year at high school, her work Vacuum Cleaner won the sketch champion in a painting competition in New York State. Her watercolor Refrigerator was selected as a representative for the AP art courses and printed on the leaflets given to high school students across the US. During the 1980-90s, Kristycharay created a series of abstract ink paintings in New York. Her professional training in music also infused rhythm into her paintings. They resembled a layer of skin, through which the inner emotions of the characters, their passion, joy, and aspirations, permeated and vividly revealed on the paper.
After returning to Taipei, she broke with the conventional approach and created a series of self-portraits drawing inspiration from Pingju, a form of opera originating from northern China. Dressed in costumes, cross-dressing, she depicted life-sized images with charcoal on large sheets of paper in a vertical composition. From carbon pencil on paper to carbon pencil and pastel on paper, from sketches to colors, not only has Kristycharay’s self-portrait series recorded the changes of her life, but it also symbolizes the release of her emotions as if they were homing pigeons, sometimes flying towards others and sometimes returning to her own hands.
The colors in her paintings are brought to life, transcending the mere concept of paints and becoming concrete objects with emotion and warmth. Instead of directly telling stories, her paintings let the audience feel them. Every brushstroke and patch of color flows together to form the vocabulary and sentences of a silent poem. Kristycharay prefers drawing over painting, which is reflected in the fluidity of her charcoal lines.
In Xiao Rong, she captures the moment when a man who picked cardboard to recycle stopped his motorcycle, providing an ordinary perspective on daily life. Her portraits of neighbors around where she lived is much like a sociological observation in slow motion that lasted for six to twelve months, where she expressed their personalities and vitality in glorious technicolor. In Mother, she set her mother in colors and clothes that reminded people of a rainforest. On the canvas, her mother looks calm, an expression not meant for an artist, but for her daughter, who she is tenderly gazing at. Conveying a universal affection for mothers, this painting is a letter home that does not need to be sent. The figure’s body is glowing like a sea creature. Kristycharay has said that age and changes in physical strength have given her new ways of seeing, and now she can see glows even on the least luminous objects.
Hanging on the wall, her paintings are like a window through which viewers can catch a glimpse of another world, one that is both powerful and fragile, both real and dreamlike. With a brush, she captures those inexpressible emotions, the complexities and contradictions deeply hidden in the heart. This exhibition displays over 40 carefully-selected works that are key to Kristycharay’s unique artistic style, created between 1989 and 2023, including charcoal self-portraits, charcoal and pastel self-portraits, pastel portraits, abstract ink paintings, and toy images painted with acrylics. It is a journey of how she continuously expands her artistic vision to capture the rhythms, colors, textures, and details of life.
