October 17, 2024 (Palo Alto, CA) - Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Our Bodies Through Our Eyes, a group exhibition curated by Gallery Co-Founder and Director Dacia Xu. Featured artists include Gina M. Contreras, Annie Duncan, HUANG Hairong, Hung Liu, Ren Light Pan, WANG You, and Stella Zhang. Our Bodies Through Our Eyes brings together the work of these seven women artists, many from the Bay Area, to exemplify the ways in which the female body and its representation can be used as a vehicle of resistance, reclamation, and healing. The exhibition will be open to the public from November 9, 2024, to January 4, 2025, with an opening celebration hosted on Saturday, November 9th, from 4:30-6:30 PM PST with many of the artists in attendance. For more information, please visit www.qualiagallery.com.

Our Bodies Through Our Eyes presents the unique perspectives of multiple generations of makers, all of whom work in distinct styles and from different approaches. The exhibition’s curation focuses on representations of the female body to explore a host of expressions, from personal narratives, to psychology and symbolism, to social and cultural contexts in the present and across history. In dialogue with each other, the selected works aim to question conventions and biases around women and to recontextualize their roles and identities through art.

“I was inspired to curate a group show featuring women artists whose work uses portraiture as a tool for deconstructing the social ideals of femininity, beauty, and gender itself.”

– Dacia Xu

Hung Liu (b. 1948, d. 2021) was a Chinese-born American artist renowned for her work engaging images of Chinese female types in different historical contexts. Liu’s oil and mixed-media paintings in the exhibition are lush, painterly re-interpretations of documentary photographs of Chinese women from different periods.

HUANG Hairong (b. 1974) creates photo-realistic paintings of idealized, doll-like girls’ faces which are overlaid – therefore disturbed, distorted, and fragmented – by patterns of water, a substance rich with symbolic meanings. Huang’s seductive, almost fetishistic paintings are connected in many ways to popular culture, suggesting a critique of the consumption of female beauty in contemporary society.

In a more expressive and flamboyant style, WANG You (b. 1988) composes large-scale paintings of a fairytale-like world in which elongated figures – often the alter ego of the artist – engage in different roles and present themselves in a range of emotional states, all amid a complex theatrical setting. Wang intricately constructs elaborate scenes with figures, costumes, animals, plants, and symbols, with a sensibility that reflects the artist’s earlier training in theater.

Gina M. Contreras (b. 1985) makes intimate self-portraits that reveal psychological states of comfort, pleasure, and loneliness in a deceptively simple style, with a folk sensibility reflecting her Chicana upbringing. Her paintings of nudes are at once brave and vulnerable, highlighting her self-awareness and body acceptance. In her work, the figure is often placed in an environment with symbols of nature and art-historical references.

Annie Duncan (b. 1997) paints saturated and distorted still-lifes of flowers and shells paired with contemporary objects such as razors, an eyelash comb, or other beauty products in domestic, everyday settings. She explores the symbolic meaning of artifacts that allude to ideals of femininity and sexuality. Duncan’s recent work “Exquisite Corpse” is an ambitious triptych that depicts idealized bodies in interiors and further engages the critique of the objectification of the female body in a consumerist society.

Ren Light Pan (b. 1990) is a Chinese-American artist who combines the traditional medium of Chinese ink with highly inventive photographic processes involving light and body heat to create subtle, often ghostly images and abstractions. Pan’s introspective self-portraits in the exhibition serve as a testament to her pain and healing, engage the representation of the trans body, and deal with hybridized and transgressive cultural and gender identities.

Stella Zhang (b. 1965) is a mixed-media artist whose work straddles the lines between painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction. Her works in the exhibition show photographic images of the artist combined with found objects and materials, in a poignant and personal expression of feelings of isolation, pain, and trauma, as well as resilience and endurance.

Qualia Contemporary Art looks forward to welcoming visitors to Our Bodies Through Our Eyes this Fall, and bringing the work of seven remarkable women artists to the Palo Alto community.