Sun, May 19
|Outro NYC
Contemporary Dissonance
“An effort to support global artists showcasing their international cultural identities” FEATURED ARTISTS Eric Lau Katusha Jin Yvonne Kwok TEAM Katusha Jin Kadi Tsang Cindy Qi


Time & Location
May 19, 2019, 5:30 PM
Outro NYC, 816 Broadway, New York, NY 10003, USA
About the event
Historical Background
Under the increasing awareness of the interconnectivity and globalization of the 21st century, art historians have begun to critically examine our much traditional and out of date view on the history of art. No longer are they adopting the Euro-American centric model that delineates a singular narrative of art history, which perhaps excluded and ignored much of the rest of the world. Scholars are now identifying that there exists and have existed multiple narratives that lie in conjunction with the Euro-American model.
Arts coming from the region outside of Euro-America were contextualized and decontextualized into a western narrative. Countries such as China were perceived in a strictly “East/West” dichotomy that emphasized the West’s modernity and the East’ s tradition. Chinese art, especially the arts coming from mainland, were seen as stuck in the past and even China’s modern artists were perceived as derivatives of their western counterparts. Scholarship nowadays, have given light to the histories and narratives of each region and culture while highlighting the equally modern and contemporary efforts of artists around the world. No longer do we see China’s modern movement as a derivative of the Euro-American one, which came at a much later time than the latter.
Concept
With the hyper-globalization felt in every corner of the world, a new generation of artists have emerged, eager to express the contemporaneity they have experienced in their everyday lives.
Contemporary Dissonance is an exhibition like that of an experimental laboratory and artist playground, inviting young and emerging artists to showcase their own understanding of contemporaneity. No longer do these artists see histories of art and narratives as just intersecting and crossing over, but rather as a fluid and dynamic exchange that almost erases all sense of established identities and locales. They question the “East/West” dichotomy but moreover, they question the establishment of multiple narratives and histories: how do you separate one cultural identity from the other when the world you have experienced is fluid and dynamic? The three artists in this exhibition, Katusha Jin, Eric Lau, Yvonne Kwok, all from different backgrounds and upbringings, question the very narrative of art and experience in their own works. Through the different media of painting, filming and photography, there seems to be this common thread that links these artists together -- a rejection of pre-existing labels and identities while also a sense of uneasiness as they fail to find an identity they can associate with. The result is an exhibition of works from these artists that seem to voice a contemporary dissonance to the currently established narratives and identities.
Team
Katusha Jin is a New York based filmmaker, painter and music designer from the U.K. She is a graduate from NYU Tisch, and is a co-founder of Art Avenue. During the past few years she has worked with a variety of artists in many parts of the world, including Hong Kong, Moscow, Beijing, Los Angeles, and New York. Her goal now is to continue to discover and share international stories through collaborations with artists around the globe.
Kadi Tsang is a graduate from NYU Tisch and a co-founder of Art Avenue. She is a trillingual artist with interests in both Arts and Sciences, global development, and conflicts of human nature. Kadi has worked on various types of live and motion picture productions, and has experience working in different departments. Being open-minded and taking the initiative on each of her projects, she devotes herself to creating an inspirational world that facilitates cultural exchange.
Cindy Xingyi Qi is a second-year art history master student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She is interested in the development of Chinese art since the late 20th century and the narratives that are used to systematize and retrace this emergence. As an independent curator, she wishes to highlight the multi-faceted identities of emerging and up-and-coming artists today and to encourage a broader and more encompassing idea of identity in the arts.
Artists
Eric is a multi-disciplined Creative Director & Art Director based in New York and raised in Hong Kong. He was first hooked with photography after an advertising photo shoot, and studied studio photography while pursuing communication design.
His photographs have earnered around 50K followers on Instagram; featured in the NY Times, TimeOut New York, PSFK, South China Morning Post, Perspective Magazine, held numerous sharing about his anti-gear approach for photography, and been shown in 14 exhibitions in NYC, HK, and Taipei.
Katusha is a New York-based filmmaker, painter, and music designer from the U.K. Having participated in her first New York art exhibition in 2018, she now focuses on exploring the cultural identity of international artists.
Fascinated and inspired by her past collaborations with international artists, Katusha has chosen these culturally diverse artists as the subject of her work. Through art films and paintings, she documents her inspirations gathered from working with these artists and understanding their process of artistic creation and expression.
Yvonne is a Hong Kong born, New York City based freelance visual artist. She aims to connect martial arts and visual arts through her artwork as she has discovered many similarities and connections between the two art forms.
Yvonne Kwok grew up practicing Chinese calligraphy and received her BFA at Hunter College where she discovered her passion in Western painting. With her multicultural background and as a martial artist specialized in traditional Taekwon-do and Practical Wing Chun, her works often merge Eastern and Western aesthetics and philosophies.