FRIENDS & LOVERS
Chinatown Soup is delighted to present Friends & Lovers: A Soup Group Show, featuring resident artists of past and present that is on view February 13 - 23, 2020. Please join us for an opening reception on Thursday, February 13 from 6 to 9pm.
Since its inception just over five years ago, Chinatown Soup has transformed a vacant storefront in Manhattan’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhood into a place for radically open creative community. Inspired by the Basement Workshop of 1970s Chinatown, an activist group of young urban planners and artists, Soup Studio provides emerging artists opportunities to share space, resources, and ideas as part of a collective. We are organized by the belief that an affordable, centrally-located creative space in downtown New York can and should exist.
We dream of a space…
where money doesn't determine value
where recognition conquers discouragement
where art is everyday life where creating isn’t getting away with something
where doing the impossible is kind of fun
where deconstructing the Canon is playtime
where you deserve what you want
where we can be our most unedited selves
The residency program encourages participating artists to develop a body of work for exhibition at the end of four months, and most residents have made their solo debuts at Soup Gallery. In the meantime, we come together to critique each other’s work, curate programming, care for Soup Cafe, or otherwise join in Soup initiatives that engage with what’s happening outside our walls.
The concept "Friends & Lovers" carries personal meaning for each artist represented, but united, these works celebrate the loving relationships fostered in Soup Studio that extend beyond the memories we made here. Many works on view were conceptualized in the basement of Soup, while others were created elsewhere in conversation with fellow resident alumni. Painting, photography, drawing, mixed media sculpture, and 3D printing represent a diversity of mediums characteristic of the Soup art-making ethos. These works were selected to convey themes of intimacy, collaboration, and joy. Together, they are emblematic of ever-evolving artistic practice and the integral nature of community within the arts.
This exhibition is curated by Soup's current resident artists – Dustin Chan, Art Jones, Vladan Sibinovic, Lilian Wu, and Yen Yen – and features past residents Yoshi Coryne, Ariel Diaz, Sonnie Kozlover, Zoe Schwartz, Ama Torres, and XIAOFANX.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dustin Chan
Close relationships are the cornerstone of civilization.
Beauty, whether aesthetic or functional, is a result of the integration of systems. The more fully integrated an object or concept is with more systems, the more beautiful it becomes. Fractals are a manifestation of complete systemic integration; a true utopic vision of hope and peace.
Yoshi Coryne
"Friends & Lovers" is a spectrum masked by an ampersand.
Yoshi Coryne is a practicing artist in New York City. His work seeks to reinterpret and rediscover the Renaissance and Greco-Roman traditions of figurative art. While his work is strongly connected to Classical Mythology, and the Western Canon, his latest works attempt to create a dense, allegorical, and bizarre narrative that rejects later Academic and Figurative schools that are reactive to the pluralities of Modernity. He enjoys Wendy's and has a plant addiction.
Ariel Diaz
“Friends & Lovers” means a lot to me.
Ariel Diaz is a designer based in New York. The core of his work addresses themes of consumerism, consumption, product design, package design, and advertising through the mediums of painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation. He is specifically interested in exploring the way capitalist greed and marketing shape our daily routines, decision-making, and ultimately, our lives.
Art Jones
[Friends & Lovers is] The match that started my fire.
Art Jones works with moving images, photography, sound, and objects. Jones often uses original and found media as raw material to be sampled and re-combined in order to examine implicit cultural meanings or suggest new ones. Jones' films and media art projects have been presented internationally, most recently at Times Art Center Berlin, Roulette Intermedium, and Mana Contemporary Art.
Sonnie Kozlover
Friends and lovers are lawless planets whose orbits are elastic as rubber—their Space is ruled by tension and tenderness, their moons sing for them, tonight.
Sonnie Kozlover is a device is a spacecraft cabin is an extension is and also is not. Sonnie dances between digital and analog processes to create geometric and figurative trials of form; the soundtrack consists of her own interpersonal relationships, body dysmorphia, and Christine and the Queens. Zoe Schwartz Friends and lovers make the world go ‘round. Zoe Schwartz is a New York artist earning her MFA in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her art embraces femininity and lies at the intersection of romance, intimacy, sex, gender, and race.
Vladan Sibinovic
[Friends and lovers are] Love that moves the sun and the other stars. (By Dante Alighieri)
Vladan Sibinovic (1987) was born in Belgrade, Serbia, and received his Master’s Degree in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade. He has had five solo shows and has been involved in several other group exhibitions in USA and Europe. Vladan currently lives in New York City and his practice encompasses painting, photography, and video.
Ama Torres
Everyone in my life is either a friend or a lover, or both. Everyone else has potential :)
Ama Torres is a New York based artist. She works with photography as a medium of commentary on esoterica in contemporary society. Her most recent solo show was Horizontal Rice (yokomeshi 横飯) at cfcp in 2019.
Lilian Wu
I rely on friends & lovers. I hope to be relied upon.
Lilian Wu is a ceramicist, photographer, and mixed-media artist based in New York. Her current work engages with memory and real/imagined archives. She co-curates the Chinatown Soup zine wall, hosts regular programs with her collective Femme Mâché, and co-organizes the NYC Feminist Zinefest.
XIAOFANX
"Friends & Lovers" means the sweetest spot in my heart.
China-born Weiyi Fan (A.K.A. XIAOFANX) is a painter, sculptor, and the Founder of Anitya Fantôme (ANITYA FANTOME, LLC), an artistic fashion brand based in Miami. XIAOFANX enjoys ongoing collaborations with Base Superstore and Waowig Studio in Miami, HOW Art Museum in Shanghai, and Chinatown Soup.
Yen Yen
Friends and lovers are those who you can share everything with and be yourself when you are next to them.
Yen Yen is a Brooklyn-based artist hailing from Taipei, Taiwan. She graduated from Pratt Institute with an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing in 2018 after receiving her Bachelor’s in Education from the University of Taipei. Yen Yen has participated in a number of group exhibitions at spaces including The Hole Gallery, New York, NY; Visual AIDS, New York, NY; the Prince Street Gallery, New York, NY; and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY. She has been a resident artist at Soup Studio since early 2019.