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Hanmi Gallery London is pleased to present the duo exhibition Talk Together at the Dialogues section of Art Projects in London Art Fair 2018, featuring two international artists: Yingmei Duan and Aisha Abid Hussain. The annually curated Dialogues section introduces a unique display of collaborations between international galleries. This year’s Dialogues’ main concept is ‘Future is Female’ in which Hanmi Gallery participates with the theme, ‘As an ontological reality: Image is Female’, dedicated to the female psyche and its complex forms of ontologies and perspectives of epistemologies.
Duan’s and Hussain’s works explore, share and juxtapose concepts and philosophies through photography, drawing and video, having a common ground as well as combining intellectually: Duan, in a poetic and introspected way, and Hussain, as a rebel and critic. Using and emphasising their bodies as one of the privileged medium to express their philosophies, the artists build simple and basic scenarios, rich in symbolism and gender criticism, intertwining aspects of consciousness and unconsciousness. Within this scenic frame, objects and personali8es speak to each other as they are released from their habitual context. Through this new layout, viewers can experience the artists’ concepts and their unexpected existential reflections. Challenging the boundaries between mediums, both artists investigate and question the social foundations of the self and gender identity.
With a profound sensitivity and an extraordinary expertise in expressing concepts through their bodies, Duan and Hussain share a fertile imagination and introspection. The personal dimension assumes cultural and political connota8ons, forming an everlasting evolution, development and expanding net. Their scenarios are loaded with symbolic and poetic meanings, oscillating between fiction and reality and fusing the artists’ reflections and those of the audience. These themes, such as a familiar loss, the fragility of life, gender preconceptions and individual loneliness give birth to touching dialogues. The voice of these artists invites the audience to immerse in the forest of their dense and complicated thoughts, feelings and concepts.
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Yingmei Duan (b. 1969, Daqing, China, currently lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany) is a performance artist, who uses her own body as an expressive medium. In her experimental and site-specific works, temporal extension, spontaneity, and the inclusion of the audience are essen8al elements. Spontaneously developing performances as situa8onal experiments helps draw an connection to the everyday. She is an enthusiastic collaborator which works with people from different cultures and local communities. Duan, a member of the avant-garde art community ‘East Village’ of the early 1990s, participated at the Live Performance Nine Holes and To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain in Beijing (1995), in collaboration with Wang Shihua, Cang Xin, Gao Yang, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Ma Zongyin, Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Zhang Binbin and Zhu Ming.
Aisha Abid Hussain (b. 1980, Peshawar, Pakistan, currently lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan) is a multimedia artist, who challenges and initiates a debate against all the contingent norms when it comes to gender, class and status in an effort to subvert the predominant clichés, using her body as a statement. She uses a variety of mediums to explore the self, and the extension of life beyond subjective limits. In a revival of past tradition, alongside the discussion of modern lives, Hussain’s work becomes an act of meditation. The underlying factor in her work is the power of politics that operates among distinctive genders, making up the hierarchal setting of cultural panorama of the South Asian societies. In Two Not Together Series (2014), Hussain manipulates the concept of patriarchal dichotomy, rejecting the phenomena of ‘Him’ being the centre of power and supreme command.
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