Ghost Stories Are All Love Stories
Ghost Stories Are All Love Stories
Curator: Banyi Huang
Artists: Lu Zhang, Mei Kazama, Banyi Huang, Maya Yu Zhang
Gallery: LES Gallery
Dates: October 7th- November 5th, 2021
Opening Reception: October 7th, 2021 5-9pm
Featuring drawings, sculptural installations, and videos by Banyi Huang, Mei Kazama, Maya Yu Zhang, and Lu Zhang, Ghost Stories Are All Love Stories searches for alternative modes of belonging and cyclical motions of time within the context of Asian American diasporic communities. Shared across various East Asian countries, the Ullam-bana festival—also known as Obon, Guijie, or Hungry Ghost Festival— originates from the Buddhist-Confucian custom that honors and celebrates ancestral spirits. At the core of these rituals are cycles of return, whether it be the return of spirits or visitation to graves. How do we negotiate emotional and physical access from a distance? How does the hunger for familial and generational connections manifest?
This show marks and reconciles shifts within narratives of migration and physical-psychological displacements. Banyi Huang’s hybrid household objects—a floor lamp sprouting three buddha heads, a Chang’E-jade-rabbit dildo, and a shaman-warrior water fountain—find ways to their speculative-mythical origins in the collaborative video made with Maya Yu Zhang, DONG 洞, a porno-horrific-fantasy set in a lunar cave. Mei Kazama’s colored pencil and pen drawings amass fragments of home, domestic objects, ritual memories, and bodies of water, creating portals that collapse and fade the distinctions of time, geography, and presence. In Lu Zhang’s work, a ceramic lamp leads to the Elysian field, a clothes hanger holds memories to dry, a flying turtle turns from a bucket cat, a painting captures her grandparents’ immaculately maintained living room even after their passing, and a video installation reflects on the process of floating between dreams and reality.
Connecting moving images, drawings, and hand-crafted objects in an interior landscape, Ghost Stories Are All Love Stories is a phantasmagoric tale of intimacy colliding with the everyday. The show inhabits liminal spaces in which spirits, mythical creatures, memories, dreams, and longings roam free. The ghostly, formulated here as a lingering affect that transcends linear notions of time and space, finds parallel in love.
Banyi Huang (b. Beijing, China, she/they) is an artist, writer, and curator based in New York. They engage with the messiness of gender/sexuality, mythology, and futurity through 3D printing, design and world building. With a M.A. in art history from Columbia University, Banyi has realized curatorial projects at Special Special (New York), PRACTICE Yonkers (New York), and Assembly Room (New York). They have contributed writing to the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Frieze, ArtAsiaPacific, OCULA magazine, Artforum China, and Performa Magazine.
Mei Kazama (b. New York, NY, they/them) is a multimedia artist currently living and working in NYC. They seek portals where past, present, and future meet to create alternative structures of belonging and care that center the liminal. Their work has been shown in various spaces in both the U.S. and Japan. They also work as an arts educator throughout NYC. They are a recipient of the LMCC Creative Engagement Grant and City Artist Corps Grant, completed a BRIC workspace residency, and have had their work published in Nat. Brut. Mei graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in Studio Art.
Lu Zhang (b. Xi’an, China, she/her) is an artist who lives and works in New York. She tells stories through sculpting, freezing the shifting narrative of one's own cultural and social experiences, and making impositions upon everyday life in the forms of installation that incorporates ceramics, moving images, found objects, sound and dreams. She received her MFA in Fine Arts and MS in Art History from Pratt Institute. She also holds a BA degree in Economics from Xi’an JiaoTong University. Zhang exhibited, performed, wrote and lectured internationally.
Maya Yu Zhang (b. Zhengzhou, China, they/them) is a filmmaker who makes and weaves images of bodies in vulnerability, ecstasy, madness and abandon to compose an unapologetic cadence of seeing, being and healing. Maya was a collaborative studio fellow at UnionDocs from 2016-2017. Their films have been shown at Black Maria Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Anthology Film Archive, among other places.
Ghost Stories Are All Love Stories is made possible in part with funds from LMCC, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Artist Corps.
PRESS:
Tricycle Review: https://tricycle.org/article/ghost-stories-love-stories/
The Guide: https://theguide.art/event/ghost-stories-are-all-love-stories-clemente-center/