Arlina Cai & Iris Moyan Wang: Drifting Through Time — Opening Reception @ Glass Rice

Art Bae Event Link proud to present Drifting Through Time , a duo exhibition of paintings by Arlina Cai and ceramics and paintings by Iris Moyan Wang. Both artists focus on the act of slowing and allowing the materials they work with to coalesce on their own: oil paint settling and spreading, glaze left to oxidize, pigment bleeding into fabric until the edge of a form takes shape. Cai and Wang ask what a body, a landscape, or a memory looks like once it’s given time to unfold. The paintings in this series began for Cai with a recent trip to the desert on the West Coast, where hours of flat, hot land with no end in sight let her mind settle and her thoughts come into focus. Living in New York, she’d forgotten what unstructured time felt like — an afternoon with nothing to do, an hour spent sitting still without guilt. The desert gave her back a sense of time as wide open and unhurried, spacious enough to notice what she’d normally move past too fast to see. Within that spaciousness, she found a soft landing for these works: a bloom of pink and pale green-gold barely holding its shape against raw, cream-colored canvas; a faint circular line becoming the only thing that gives way into a face, or a bud, or neither. Central to her practice is thinning pigment almost to water, letting it pool and drift where it wants rather than directing it. By giving the paint permission to spread at its own pace, Cai treats time as one of her materials. For Wang, time and nature work like passages between one state and another. Her paintings and ceramic vessels draw on imagery she grew up around and stories told to her by her parents and partner — Buddhist mural paintings, floral ornaments, memories of rural China, and funerary ceramics from the Silk Road region near her birthplace, where centuries of erosion and oxidation have softened and fragmented murals scattered across the land. Wang borrows that same slow damage as technique: diluted pigment and oxidized glaze are left to diffuse, producing the soft, hazy edges that run through her depictions of Asian female figures, botanicals, and at times, animals. Pencil-thin lines coil into stems and shape around a bloom rendered in close detail before dissolving into rust-colored haze. Figures intertwine with botanicals in the space between one form and the next, their bodies capable of growth, adaptation, and change rather than fixed in place. Placed together, Wang’s dense, coiling lines and Cai’s ephemeral washes both attest to the depiction of time. As a material, it can be used to soften a form, wind it into something more layered than it started as, or transform it entirely. Drifting Through Time gives its viewers the same thing both Wang and Cai allow their materials: time enough to become something else. location provided by event source: "808 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California, 94109" ―――――――――― SF Stuff To Do