Face to Face: May 2025
ANDRÉ HEMER
Studio portrait of André Hemer. Courtesy of the artist.
There’s a baroque quality to André Hemer’s luminescent photo-paintings. When I visited the Vienna-based artist’s temporary studio on Bleeker Street this month, he was working on a series of paintings that unfurled in lush purple and golden tones. Each painting’s base consists of printed photographs of plants taken from a vantage point down below. Interwoven petals and branches form a canopy-like structure, which is further extended by the addition of suave, fabric-like brushstrokes on top. The artist’s hand interjects the defined contours of the digital image by introducing chance, accidental droplets of paint, and seamless fluidity. While the façade of Hemer’s current body of work tends to be flat, the undulating rhythm of fabric-like folds in the image creates an engulfing sense of motion.
“Finding alchemy is always the question,” says Hemer, pointing out the enduring interaction between pixels and paint, two core components that deliver images to the eye. Hemer’s paintings, therefore, become interfaces that connect divergent ways of perceiving—by precision and by approximation, by clarity and by intuition. There’s a level of purity that underpins his interest in the image itself as a site of balancing how “the real” presents itself. I was surprised to hear that Hemer describes his paintings as “decorative,” given how frequently the word is invoked as a critique in IAE. Hemer proposes the presence and prevalence of beauty in his work as symbiotic with the quiet intellectualism behind his pursuit of the image—“chase the image,” he says. “The image becomes the most important thing, and materiality gets in the mix.”
Hemer is also the co-founder of Painting Diary, a publishing platform and residency program focusing on conversations around paintings and seeing artworks in real life.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
ARMANDO NIN
Armando Nin’s studio. Courtesy of the artist.
There is always a feeling of longing when one artist visits another’s studio. As I walk into his studio on Canal Street, Armando Nin is bringing down canvases he had left on the rooftop to be washed off with the rain—the ephemeral quality of the material used in his practice allows the surface to be “erased” and inscribed continuously like a palimpsest. Each painting created only with candle soot is suspended with the artist lying underneath inside a DIY provisional structure—almost like a playhouse—in which the marks and incisions are shaped by the scramble between the artist’s breath and the candle flames.
I was reminded of an image from long ago that inspired me to start making art. As a teenager, I used to ride buses early in the morning to go to school. I remember watching people sleeping and leaning their heads towards the glass windows. I watched them get off at their stop, and someone else would take their seat and place their head in the same greasy window imprint, accumulating DNA better than any scientific lab samples.
This idea of capturing and inscribing something as volatile as a breath or a fingerprint can be found in Marcel Duchamp’s concept of infrathin, defined as “the warmth of a seat which has just been left”, “when the tobacco smoke also smells of the mouth which exhales it”, or “when two forms are cast in the same mold” [1]—and equally present in Armando Nin’s Soot Paintings (2020–25).
Nin tells me about how he first encountered soot “graffiti” made with a lighter in a hallway of his childhood home. “In the tonal subtleties of soot, its light-absorbing surface, and the rhythm dictated by the flame . . . my process is governed not by precision but by responsiveness, as soot gathers into fields of staccato dots or lines that resemble greasy thumbprints or delicate scars.” At the same time, he relates the gesture of using soot with Italian Renaissance fresco painting, pigment making, and artists who painted under candlelight. There’s a feeling of being in a state of trance when I closely observe the soot marks following their shapes, rhythms, and cadence, as precise as a sundial.
Nin’s paintings create a personal dialect that establishes an anachronistic threshold, evoking the history of painting, from cave paintings to Surrealism and Arte Povera to the first photographic experiences using something as archaic as a pinhole. His narrative and documentary canvas surfaces capture ephemeral gestures, time, and materiality, tracing the history of their own making.
[1] Duchamp’s notes were posthumously published in French by Duchamp, M., Hultén, K. G. P., & Matisse, P. (1980).
— Andreia Santana
MIYA ANDO
Portrait of Miya Ando, courtesy of the artist.
When I visited Japanese American artist Miya Ando’s studio in Long Island City, she first showed me the indigo abstract works on Kozo paper she has been working on. No identifiable pattern is set in course over the process of creation; what one sees is what one sees, though the artist always strives to evoke traces of episodes of memory dear to her heart in each painting. Taking inspiration from cosmology, change of weather, and natural landscape, these works derive their referents from the chemical transformation of indigo under exposure to oxygen. One of the first natural pigments used by early human civilization, indigo dye, according to Ando, indexes time. The artist’s labor-intensive process practice means that a work on paper often needs to be dyed over an extended period so the applied indigo can manifest a range of optical effects.
Miya Ando, Mono no aware. Photo by Adrian Toynton.
Indeed, time is essential in Ando’s other works as well. The artist grew up in a remote village in Japan and was familiar with a way of life intimately in tune with human-nature harmony and the metaphysics of following a cyclical sense of time. “I am really finding comfort in non-Western sources of knowledge and the ways language takes on such knowledge,” Ando told me. This had led the artist to create paintings representing the East Asian calendar of twenty-four solar terms, with each solar term being divided into three microseasons (if carefully following the calendar, farmers in ancient China could expect a bountiful harvest) and the vast vocabulary describing the natural phenomenon of rain in the Japanese language. For her solo show, Mono no aware, at Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Los Angeles, curated by Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello, Ando created a body of works departing from the idea that incompleteness can carry its own beauty, and that impermanence and imperfection are not necessarily tragic. A sculptural installation made from pinewood bricks, charred in the style of shou-sugi-ban and coated with silver nitrate, reflects, on the microcosmic level, the karesansui rock garden of Ryōan-ji. Micronized pure silver on aluminum and silkscreen reveals movements of cloud and galaxy, respectively, reminiscent of works by earlier generations of Fluxus artists who repurpose found objects and favor stripped simplicity.
— Qingyuan Deng
ZISHI HAN & WEI YANG
Portraits of Wei Yang (left) and Zishi Han (right). Courtesy of the artists.
Frankfurt am Main-based artists Zishi Han and Wei Yang met at the prestigious art school Städelschule, where Yang was studying with Judith Hopf and Han with Haegue Yang. While both artists make works about queerness, their approaches are very different. Yang’s paintings, such as (and) Sea (2024) and Eventually fall (2025) draw their influences from Chinese landscape painting and literati culture yet also flirt with the German tradition of “ugly” painting. Gestural, frantic, and sensual, these paintings depict faces and bodies under the spell of intense emotion, entangled with each other and their environment. Their backstory often is culled from the past, mining alternative forms of community in vernacular culture; their tantalizing execution decidedly is situated in the present. Yang’s sculptures, often made from affordable materials such as papier-mâché, cardboard, and PLA, deal with how Chinese mythologies and folklores complicate the idea of border, literally and metaphorically. Covert Eight Immortals (2022) explores the afterlife of the story of the Eight Immortals—one of them is the fluid-gendered Lan Caihe, a patron of florists and gardeners—which arrived in overseas Chinese communities by trade routes. Mary: Seductive Paris (2022) toys with a late Qing fiction that narrates the unlikely romance between a European woman and a Chinese man and their arduous journey through fantastical landscapes. Hé Hé (2023) frustrates the modernist, Eurocentric notion of same-sex desire vis-à-vis a pair of Tang Dynasty poet-monks who later became symbols of fraternal bond, marking the contours of male sociality without being reduced to the sexual.
Han, on the other hand, creates large-scale sculptures and installations that recuperate minor histories from archives, often paying attention to the unstable meaning of sexuality, nation-state, and vitality, in all their misrecognition and misunderstanding. His current site-specific exhibition Echoes from the Gaps of Walls at Guangdong Times Museum, as part of the inaugural E.A.T. PRIZE Annual Artist Award, is an exercise in historiography, jumping between Qian Xuesen’s house arrest in the United States, early cybernetic theory, and the creation myth of Nüwa. Two metal sculptures vent (cocoon I) (2025) and vent (cocoon II) (2025) borrow from Qian’s rocket design, suspended between the infrastructural and the ornamental. Inside, we see apparatuses of connectivity, on the verge of being activated or succumbing to their fragility. uncontain (Guangzhou) (2025) is simultaneously a construction site and a performatively self-sustaining ecological system, gesturing toward the leap from nature into culture that defines creation myths. moth II (2023) is a video of moth activities at night shot under UV light, which visually also evokes cellular reproduction, and by extension, how biology liberates and further subjugates the body. For Han, queerness is a general affect, lurking near all politically fraught, ambiguous sites.
Zishi Han and Wei Yang, Hairpin Beneath 2 钗之后 二 (2025), performance view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2025. HD single-channel video, live performance, light, color, sound. 29:48 mins. Commissioned by SculptureCenter, New York, 2025. Video cast depicted: Wei Yang, Chengyu Wu, Antone Liu. Live cast depicted: Wei Yang, Yushu Wang, Yimiao Liu. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Walter Wlodarcyzk.
Their collective research, Hairpin Beneath, a convergence of Han’s structural thinking and Yang’s sensitivity to historical specificity, is concerned with historical Chinese homoerotic literature, complicating and expanding the identitarian logic of queerness. Rewriting portions of a Ming dynasty anthology of homoerotic stories Biàn ér chāi and producing videos and performances based on their reworked scripts, transported into the present, Han and Yang often situate their adaptation in the context of shattering or threatened power dynamics and how their (sometimes semi-autobiographical) character’ desire warp around operations of power yet exceed power’s capture. At their recent exhibition for Sculpture Center’s In Practice program, a live performance by actors selected from an open call unfolds, across lovesickness and shifting alliances and allegiances among three queer men in an art academy, against the video Hairpin Beneath 2 (2025) that stages similar concerns with a more elaborated storyline. Han’s xoxo (2025), a web of stainless-steel beads and cables installed on the ceiling, and Yang’s gong gurl (2025), a floor-bound papier-mâché gong, form the network of reverberating desire. A net that allows the spectral traces of our illicit attachments to linger; they sometimes retreat into the shadows of archives but never disappear.
— Qingyuan Deng