Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to present Hidden Stories, featuring 6 contemporary artists who work with photography as their primary medium. The artists in the exhibition are all storytellers; Rene Balcer, Stephen King and Myeong Soo Kim form narratives through their depictions of natural landscape, while South Ho, Ho Tam and Pixy Liao’s imagery is more personal, showing glimpses of everyday life, cityscapes and moments that enter the surreal.

Born in Montreal, René Balcer searches for natural compositions that suggest a sense of disquietude coupled with an implied or hidden narrative. Although several of his works in this exhibition offer sweeping imagery of natural landscapes, the subject of these pieces, and of his work in general, often deals with histories of social injustice around the globe. Specific to the group of works here is a little known history of displaced Inuit communities in northern Canada: in 1953 and 1955, the Canadian government had the RCMP move 92 Inuit people coming from several family groups. Forcefully migrating from Inukjuak in Northern Quebec 2000 km north to Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, and to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, they were left with no knowledge of the seasons, local weather, or animal migration patterns. It is a testament to the resilience of this community that they were able to survive. Far Away shows two Inuit Mothers with their kids, taken on Canada Day at Resolute, while Saw, a particularly striking image, presents a rusty saw as the sole evidence of human presence in the otherwise pristine wilderness. Balcer’s triptych Arctic Ice presents a different type of evidence – that of the melting glacial ice, a striking witness to global warming in a location that few of us ever see.

Based in Hong Kong and New York, Stephen King is an award-winning landscape photographer whose work also deals with the environment; he approaches it by capturing fleeting natural phenomena on film. Fascinated by patterns formed by nature, King travels the world in search of images that explore the landscape's capacity for both drama and serenity. King's work has been described as painterly, a style he cultivates through his use of light, color and composition. This exhibition features 3 photographs taken during his travels: Morning Meander, taken in China, is as mysterious as it is serene, opening up a host of questions about the subject of the photograph. Where are they headed? What is their life like, and what hidden stories does it contain? Reynisfjara Beach and River Delta 28, taken in Iceland, hover on the edge of abstraction. Nature’s varied patterns are captured through King’s lens and exude a sense of movement, evolution, and inevitable change.


Myeong Soo Kim is a Korean American artist who creates process-based works which explore the ineffable, expressive, and material limits of images. The works on display focus on the artist’s longstanding engagement with natural landscapes — a recurring motif throughout Kim’s practice. Often informed by his personal travels through various geographies, from Utah’s desert to the Bolivian Andes, the artist’s practice visually reconciles actual places with expressions of metaphysical encounters, revealing a profound sensitivity to deep psychological states like dreaming, distance, and loss.

A large part of Kim’s oeuvre has been collage, and here he combines this practice with his photography to produce layered images. The constructed landscapes in his photographic works almost read as natural from far away, but upon closer inspection are distorted and artificially constructed. Untitled green landscape and Collapsed landscape 004 are, in effect, two versions or ‘ways of seeing’ the same scene, according to the artist. The way we perceive our surroundings differ from individual to individual, and the internal narratives that we create differ as well. In his work, Kim creates space to question our relationship to place, time, illusion, and the emotions that this discovery evokes.

Based in Hong Kong, South Ho Siu Nam works across various mediums including photography, performance, drawing, and mixed media installations. His works address the wonders and helplessness of living, the spirituality of existence, as well as the socio-political awareness of Hong Kong.

For Hidden Stories, we present After EveryDaily VI, part of a new series that reflects upon the artist’s experiences with the Hong Kong democratic social movement. In a recent related series called Work naming has not yet succeeded, Ho revisited the sites of the ‘anti-extradition law movement’ protests from 2019, documenting the (sometimes barely) whitewashed walls that were covered with graffiti and slogans during those turbulent years. Returning to a form of expression first used in 2013 including colorful blocks painted directly onto his photographs, this new body of work employs many of the same photographs; the photos are printed in black and white, being more subtle in self-expression compared to the original series. Called Every Daily, the 2013 series was a way to process the vast changes that his Tin Shui Wai neighborhood had undergone, as well as of his father’s recent passing at the time. With After EveryDaily, Ho returns to the original intent of Every Daily, repurposing in conversation with the continued changes taking place in Hong Kong. According to the artist, this new body of work allows him to focus on his “personal use of this painting/drawing style as a practice or form of spiritual healing”.

Ho Tam was born in Hong Kong and has been based in Toronto, Canada for many years. He works across different disciplines including video, photography and printmaking, often dealing with themes of social visibility and representation. Acting as an acute observer and active participant, Tam tirelessly documented the surroundings with photography and video during his stay in New York from 1996 to 2003—both an insider and outsider. Hair culture in Manhattan’s Chinatown became one of the main focal points of his time in the city; highlighting the working class within a marginalized community, his photographs explore how everyday individuals negotiate their identity in the larger social context. At one level, the barbershops function as a refuge of self care and comfort. On another, they evoke questions on the conformity under homogenized standard of beauty and societal expectation. In this respect, A Manifesto of Hair explores the relationships among race, class and commerce through looking at the care of hair.

Pixy Liao uses her work as a vehicle with which to explore and question existing gender roles, relationship dynamics, cultural traditions and expectations. In everything she makes, she exerts her gaze; however subtle the portrayal, she is always the one in control. Many of her photographs pull inspiration from art history and the media; but just as often are produced from her imagination. Storytelling is inherent in the works, though she takes care to leave the narrative open-ended, allowing the audience to fill in the blanks.

The images in this exhibition create an introductory feeling to hypothetical stories, and could easily be interpreted as the opening scene of very different films: the sci-fi saga Space Girl met Earth Boy; or the surreal Alice in Wonderland-esque Day Dream. Time to Wake up, inspired by Balthus’ The Room and Shadows on the wardrobe are both bathed in mysterious yellowish tones, provoking the viewer to imagine the imminence of the day (or night).


ARTIST TALK
Hidden Stories - The Arctic
René Balcer, Artist
Patricia Marroquin Norby,
Associate Curator of Native American Art
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Saturday, 2 November 2024
2 pm
The talk will be live streamed on Instagram @alisanfineartsnyc
Eschewing studio work and staged images, René Balcer seeks natural compositions that convey a sense of disquietude and an implied or hidden narrative, as well as images that engage his interest in social justice.
Patricia Norby made history in 2020 as the Met’s first full-time curator of Native American art. She has since curated a number of groundbreaking exhibitions during her tenure at the museum.

FIRESIDE CHAT
Hidden Stories: Abstract Nature
Participating artist:
Stephen King
Tuesday, 26 November 2024
6pm-7pm
The event will be live streamed on Instagram @alisanfineartsnyc