Exhibition

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “The Hand of the Artist,” an exhibition of thesis work by the MFA Fine Arts class of 2023, curated by SVA faculty member, curator and writer Sara Raza and organized by MFA Fine Arts Program Coordinator, Isabelle Schipper. The exhibition will be on view Thursday, July 27 through Monday, August 14, at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor, New York City. 

Poetically exploring the artist’s hand as a conceptual and critical tool, this exhibition weaves together drawing, installation, painting, sculpture and video. It addresses interconnected themes of rebellion, recreation, recollection, reconstruction and repair. Taking a decentralized approach, “The Hand of the Artist” features the works of 38 intergenerational artists whose practices unite local, global and digital viewpoints from a fast-evolving and complex world.

A number of artists celebrate creative rebellion as an overt or covert strategy for and against tradition in art and society. Katinka Huang's drawings explore the relationship between the clinical and the critical, centering on the female figure as both a fantasy and an oddity in art and science. Deeya Bhugra's large-scale canvases explore non-objective and non-representational painting. Simon Cooper's painted scenes of jubilant social gatherings allude to community and nod towards classical, medieval and modernist painterly traditions that combine the figurative and the abstract.

The works of Tom Hecht and Yin Ming Wong contemplate recreation and sport as nation-building exercises for dominance and resilience. Hecht's sculptural investigations into spatial arenas for sporting events critically decode sporting competitions and parades. Wong's self-portrait paintings of herself engaging in ping-pong games explore the maintenance of a superpower persona from a feminist perspective, challenging Orientalist depictions of the "East" and probing the idea of sport beyond a mere game.

Nostalgia and recollection play active roles in the works of Capucine Bourcart, whose felted pieces of her childhood garden are entirely constructed from memory, with the garden functioning as a metaphor for paradise. Sora Xu's paintings from childhood photographs aim to reconcile complex mother-daughter relationships, creating a patchwork with visible evidence of faces, signs, symbols and deliberate negative spaces that suggest gaps and holes in the reliability of memory.

The need to renovate and rebuild are important concerns in mending and canceling out extractive practices. Jingyao Huang creates intricate sculptural forms that suggest skyscrapers and other industrial-era buildings, extending our understanding of photography and reflecting our contemporary cityscapes as sites of extraction and labor. Conversely, Sunghyuk Kwon's installation of a natural environment created from toilet tissue features a fragile suspended tree structure and branches, engaging in high and low registers of material culture, craft and fine art. 

Anoushka Bhalla and Fernando Monroy's works allude to the body in a dual state of injury and repair. Bhalla's figurative mixed-media canvas reflects upon the wounded flesh resulting from colonial and sectarian violence. Monroy's latex works meditate on the injured body, with torso-like canvases hued with purple, blue, and yellow shades reminiscent of bruising or a decaying body, punctuated by protruding pins that are suggestive of stigmata and the need for cathartic repair.

Representing the entanglement of contradicting and fragmented ideas, the exhibition laces together several urgent concerns and provides a prism for reframing histories and possible futures. “The Hand of the Artist” features works by Anoushka Bhalla, Bona V, Camila Varon Jaramillo, Capucine Bourcart, Chukwuemeka Chukwu, Davina Hsu, Deeya Bhugra, Fernando Monroy, Helia Chitsazan, Hwichan Ko, Insook Park, James Jaxxa, Jingyao Huang, Ji Woo Kim, Kaiqing Yu, Katinka Huang, Lanyi Gao, Lu Xia, M Sawyer Ballance, Nianxin Li, Pei Ou, Polin Huang, Rosie Kim, Sangho Han, Silvia Muleo, Simon Cooper, Sora Xu, Sunghyuk Kwon, Tianshu Zhang, Tom Hecht, Yanmei Jiang, Yin Ming Wong, Yingyao Liang, Yissho Oh, Yuli Aloni Primor and Zhiheng Guo.

Sara Raza is an award-winning curator and writer specializing in global art and visual cultures from a postcolonial and post-Soviet perspective and is the author of Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion (2022, Black Dog Press). Raza has curated exhibitions and projects for international museums, biennials and festivals. She teaches in SVA’s MA Curatorial Practice program and is a Red Burns Fellow at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

The SVA Chelsea Gallery is open Monday through Thursday, and Saturday, from 10:00am to 6:00pm, and closed on Fridays and Sundays. It is fully accessible by wheelchair. Masks are encouraged but not required.