Stay Puft
Chinn Wang
Polly Addison Gallery
February 23rd – March 30th, 2024
Opening Reception February 23rd from 5:00-8:00pm
Chinn Wang’s new artwork, Stay Puft, continues the artist’s exploration into transitions in life and death. Wang’s installation plays with ideas of mortality using the character of an auspicious Chinese mythological creature, the qilin, a being that appears as a harbinger and celebration of the birth of a great leader or the passing of a wise sage. The benevolent qilin prances lightly upon puffs emanating from a collection of seemingly banal everyday objects – a fireplace bellows, a teapot, a perfume bottle, a bicycle horn – embracing the last gasps of air from these objects as its celestial pathway. This acceptance of the futility of life mirrors the artist’s own grappling with inevitable loss and the perpetual evaporation of our memories. In Stay Puft and all her work, Wang employs coded visual language and symbolic iconography to further her investigation of legacy, history, and the tethered and cyclical experience of many immigrant families.
About the Artist:
Chinn Wang (pronunciation: Cheen Wong) is a printmedia artist exploring themes of erasure, lineage, and superstition, in addition to complicated transitions in desire, chance, and mortality. She earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a dual BA in Art Practice and Art History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Print Center, Philadelphia, The Denver Art Museum, The Korean Cultural Center in Beijing, China, and in cities including Chicago, San Francisco, and Berlin among others. Wang is Teaching Professor and Foundations Coordinator in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Denver and lives in Boulder, Colorado.
