Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century
The Gallery at UTA, University of Texas at Arlington, Feb. 4-March 29, 2025
UNO Gallery, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Sept. 2-Oct. 31, 2025
Contemporary art discourse and international art markets are often driven by an unspoken interest in traumatic biography. Recent blue-chip artists of the Asian diaspora have been canonized through the public exploitation of mental health struggles, the sensationalizing of tragic early deaths, and the politicization of personal experiences. Art markets also frequently exhibit a preference for artists whose work represents trauma in a way readily legible to the viewer—in order to better monetize biography in relation to art. While cynical, these practices are applicable to an array of modern and contemporary artists and have served as a powerful force shaping the art canon over the past century.
But what of artists from underrepresented communities whose lives were fundamentally altered by the major conflicts of the twentieth century who chose to never directly represent their traumatic experiences? Such artists are often doubly ignored. First, as members of diasporic minorities, they were ignored or treated as enemies during the late twentieth-century American public reckoning over these conflicts. Second, as artists choosing indirect approaches to grapple with conflict experience, they have been left out of the academic discourse and market interest in artwork generated by conflict.
Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century explores the foundational question of how we raise awareness about and effectively characterize the artwork of conflicted artists of the diaspora who never produced overt “conflict art.” This question is examined through the lives and artwork of three Asian diasporic painters: 趙少昂Chao Shao-an (1905–1998), 岡山圭昭Keisho Okayama (1934–2018), and Ann Phong (b. 1957). Beyond parallel biographies touched by major U.S.-led conflicts in East and Southeast Asia over the course of the twentieth century, these artists were also selected for this exhibition based on resonances in philosophical and technical approaches to painting their experience. Each artist intimately explores the legacies of conflict across the diaspora without representationally depicting their themes. Ranging from classical Chinese bird-and-flower ink painting to monumental abstract acrylic canvases, the artworks in the exhibition resist biographical interpretation upon initial encounter. Abbreviated from a quote by Okayama, “solace in painting” points instead towards a deeper connection to the lives and approaches of these remarkable individuals. How did their artwork offer solace from and provide a space for grappling with difficult questions of conflict and identity? And, in the face of work that obscures connections to the life of the artist, how can we as viewers understand the relationship between life and art in a way that is non-exploitative and remains grounded in celebration of the artwork itself?
