FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 19, 2024 (Palo Alto, CA) - Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to announceVictoria Yau: Mountain Cloud, a solo exhibition curated by Dr. Ellen Huang, Ph.D, former visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies and associate professor of art history and material culture at Art Center College of Design. Shanghai-born artist Victoria Yau (1939-2023) was one of the earliest Asian-American contemporary abstract artists, painting from the late 1950s to the late 2010s. During her lifetime, her work was shown at the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous other museums and galleries throughout the United States, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Yau’s oeuvre has been rediscovered posthumously thanks to the archiving and preservation efforts of her son, Philip Yau, and the in-depth research of curator Ellen Huang with graduate student Beryl Zhou. 

Following recent exhibitions at Stanford University’s East Asian Studies Library, at Pen+Brush—a 130-year-old gallery for women artists—in New York, and a major acquisition by Northwestern University’s Block Museum, Qualia Contemporary Art is delighted to showcase over 50 years of work by Yau as her place in the art historical canon continues to be established. The exhibition will be open to the public from January 11, 2025, to March 1, 2025, with an opening celebration hosted on Saturday, January 11, from 4:30-6:30 PM PST. For more information, please visit www.qualiagallery.com.

Yau created over 700 works across multiple mediums, including abstract ink paintings, watercolors, collages, prints, and textiles. After immigrating to the United States in 1960, she transitioned from traditional Chinese landscape painting to abstraction, blending historical ink painting traditions with contemporary abstract expressionism. Her works, often exploring texture, line, and color, emphasize bodily presence and perception, while challenging conventional landscape depictions. Yau's background in Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting, combined with her studies in philosophy and aesthetics, deeply influenced her approach to art. In addition to her visual practice, Yau was a prolific writer and poet. She wrote both academic texts – such as the use of color in the history of Chinese art - and poetry as a form of personal expression, often evoking distant and imagined landscapes.

The artist’s multifaceted practice, shaped by her diasporic experience and multiple cultural influences, illuminates the significance of multilingualism in the development of early Asian American and Asian diasporic art, as well as in global modernism. This exhibition seeks to reconsider her work as part of the broader context of postwar art history, highlighting the complexities of her transnational journey and her contributions to the history of modern art. Spanning over half a century of art-making in disparate locations of Chicago, Florida, Phoenix, and New York, Yau’s abstraction and material experimentation ask us to consider transformations in East Asian landscape painting from painted compositions to a distillation of form and line. 

On view at Qualia are a selection of works that showcase Yau’s “mountain clouds,” the artist’s own reworking of the historical term for landscape, “mountain-water 山水 (shanshui).” Her monoprints, watercolor collages, and ink works, present landscapes in their most reduced, elemental forms. For example, Canyon from the Side and Mammoth Rock highlight textures in nature using color, collage-work, and material juxtaposition. Meadow and Rain (or Xaiu) play with linear mark-making through ink and printmaking techniques to depict blades of grass and rapid precipitation. 

During the later years of Yau’s life, she returned to working with ink and further expanded her process of abstraction by engaging with material chance and effect. The interaction of ink and paper creates physical wrinkles that add a sense of movement along a diagonal in her waterscapes (Dancing Water, Flowing), rockscapes (Kissing Stones), and depictions of other natural effects (Dewdrops). Her fascination with abstracted landscapes manifests also in the simplicity of her bilingual titles. 

In one of her poems, Yau begins by writing:

Mountains chase clouds 

Clouds trail mountains

Echoing longing 

(River Dream, 2005)

For Yau, the abstract and the poetic best conveyed her artistic intervention: landscapes of her own, the mountain clouds (Sea Dream). Qualia Contemporary Art looks forward to introducing visitors and the Palo Alto community to Victoria Yau’s legacy and remarkable, lifelong practice, and foregrounding the work of this seminal Asian-American female artist.