The Cumulative Effect: Songwon Art Center, Seoul

Cheyney Thompson’s (b. 1975, Baton Rouge, Louisiana) new series of Displacement paintings posits each canvas’s ground as a touch-sensitive surface. The works adopt a uniform structure of five-millimeter square black marks painted in a gridded pattern atop a white ground. Before the paint is dry, Thompson deploys an assortment of custom silicone tools against the surface, forcing the wet squares out of place. He adds no new material, but rather subjects the existing marks to this process of reorganization. The resulting transformations appear as extensions of squares into lines, glyph-like forms, and sweeping, sinuous fields of paint. Each painting has become a record of the tools’ interaction with the surface: the stops and starts, the kinetic limits of Thompson’s body and the entropic movement of the order of painted squares into noise. But, they are also pictures, as this play of ruptures and conjured forms has been frozen into an unsettled pictorial field, still with the trappings of figure-ground, composition, and space.

Cheyney Thompson lives and works in New York. For further information on Cheyney Thompson, click here.

Clare Rojas (b.1976 Columbus, OH) employs a deeply personal visual language in her work, alternating between dense figurative scenes, and minimal, abstract compositions. Rojas approaches both with a consistent, lyrical sensitivity as she interjects totemic references to her own life, seeking new ways to communicate narrative, playing on our instinctive desire to decode, and comprehend images. Drawing on her interest in languages shared throughout the natural world, particularly that of birds that are capable of recognizing human faces through geometric forms, Rojas looks to distill fleeting memories and experiences into concrete shapes. The resulting works are akin to a musical arrangement, mixing symbolic elements, formal decisions, as well as autobiographical allusions, to evoke life’s cycles, from sickness to health, entrapment to freedom, and birth and re-birth.

Clare Rojas lives and works in Northern California. For more information on Clare Rojas, click here.

He Xiangyu's (b. 1986, Kuandian County, Liaoning Province, China) conceptual practice manifests in multi-year projects that span sculpture, drawing, installation, film and publications. Emerging as part of a generation of artists who experienced the post-socialist state of China, He's work looks to shift the viewer's perception of cultural signifiers through an examination and manipulation of material. 

He Xiangyu's Palate Wonder works belong to his ongoing series Palate Project, which was started in 2012 after He lived briefly in the US, where language barriers proved difficult to navigate. He began translating the ridges, bumps, and grooves of his palate through perceptions felt with his tongue, into various visual forms. The act of translation, always aimed at demystifying

the subject, here only seems to further complicate it. The phenomenological processes responsible for constructing a sense of interior space intrinsic to vocalization, the curl of the tongue that produces "rat" as opposed to "that", become a function of He Xiangyu's body mapping. Identifiable anatomical structures dissolve and re-emerge, eventually evolving into color fields with

only the slightest hints of form. Based on a seemingly obvious premise, Palate Project revels in a Cartesian split of mind and

body, illustrating that, in spite of proximity to subject, art remains the annotation to a lost referent.

He Xiangyu lives and works in Berlin. For further information on He Xiangyu, click here.

Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935, St. Louis, MO) is known for creating complex and layered images in which figurative elements emerge from abstract fields of vibrant color. Jackson’s practice is informed by a deep understanding of global art history—from early modern European painting to African art. Yet his works do not aim to elevate a single message, narrative, or meaning. Rather, the works serve as an open invitation to slow and close looking, encouraging viewers to stake emotional claim on the paintings and not wait for instructions on what to see.

His works are held in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, Detroit Institute of the Arts, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others.

Oliver Lee Jackson lives and works in Oakland, California. For further information on Oliver Lee Jackson's work, click here.