Asia Art Center (Taipei) is delighted to present Crystal Lupa: EXOTICA, which will run from May 11 to June 30, 2024. The exhibition marks a vital turning point in the artist’s creative journey and the debut of multiple new works. Featuring two-dimensional paintings, three-dimensional ceramic sculptures, and animated works, the exhibition embodies the rich visual diversity of the artist’s work.
To create this new body of work, Lupa revisits her memories of traveling in the exotic lands of the Sahara Desert, combining them with spectacles and fantasies from the inner world to convey her resonance with and evocation of the self and human feelings. “Evocation” is the central idea to EXOTICA. It is also a vital element to generate the visual depth of her work through the multi-layered viewing experience. Take The Sleepless Square Djemaa el Fna for example, a painting based on a photograph taken by the artist during her travels: the blurry atmosphere engendered by the brushstrokes and the effect of a soft glow posits the image between reality and fantasy, soliciting more imagination on what lies behind the work. In Winter Wonderland, the skaters’ movements and a sense of speed are recreated by Lupa’s skillful application of brushworks. The artist also utilizes blurred brushstrokes and the physical interstices between the brush marks to create more temporalities, thus evoking the spectator’s inner space and association of experiences.
Furthermore, Lupa also blends memories and her own feelings, encoding them into a range of symbols, such as images, brushstrokes, and colors through her approaches to painting. Examples can be found in the blank wall in Tanning or the roadside piles of fabric in Nomadic. These large areas of blankness, which remind the spectator of overexposed images, form a semiotic lack intended by the artist as a way to evoke memory, engaging spectators to complete the works by projecting their own feelings and emotions. A similar example is Fragments of Memory, a set of eight paintings completed with an animated short film based on the narrative depicted in the paintings. This sign of blankness is transformed and extended in the display of the work: the space between the pieces on the wall are like blank film frames, whilst the animated short film appears to imply that the audience can fill in the blanks to form continuous images in their own minds.
Some of the works in the exhibition, such as Once Upon an Ocean, The Midnight Composer, and Floral Velvet are painted on canvases of atypical shapes. These canvases can be viewed as three-dimensional objects. Their shapes can even be understood as a portal that connects different spaces, as well as the external manifestation and extension of the narrative. In addition, The Wild Swan and One Hundred Years of Solitude – two works painted on linen and in the form of three-fold screens – are similar examples. A screen is a piece of partition furniture used to compartmentalize a space, but they are used by the artist to create corresponding meanings between two-dimensional paintings and the physical space, making the spectators feel like they are enveloped by the images and unfurling the interrelation between the exhibition space, the artworks, and the spectator.
“Diffusing, experimenting, and focusing” constitute an endlessly cyclic process that drives the growth of the artist’s work. Based on the works showcased in this exhibition, Lupa’s artistic fluidity and inclusiveness are visibly evident. Whether through intentional blankness, the form of screens, the diversity of canvases in terms of shapes, or the shift from visualizing her inner monologues in previous works to her current reflection on the collective consciousness, we can see that the artist has developed a richer and multilayered visuality and content depth in her creative work.