“El Monte Farmers,” Phung Huynh

“Young Artist in Landscape,”   Sergio Teran

ALGUNAPARTE       

Featuring the artwork of:
Phung X Huynh | Sergio Teran

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The Avenue 50 Studio is pleased to present Sergio Teran and Phung X. Huynh in a two-person show. Teran and Huynh work in two completely different painting styles. While Teran’s paintings are vibrant with color,thick with paint and surreal and personal in content; Huynh’s paintings are meticulous, spare and delicate in touch. Her content is pop Chinese. Both artists deal with their specific contemporary culture in their own way. Yet the combination of the two speaks to the multicultural majority of our City.

Sergio Teran

My works represent personal experiences, whose meanings are reconstructed through the disciplines of painting, printmaking, and drawing. I am a storyteller. My content is symbolic, with subjects that have cultural and personal meaning to me.

My paintings are backdrops of colliding realities (past and present) mixed with familiar faces. The people in my work are close to me; family members, friends and colleagues, masked and unmasked. My narratives are both, personal and unapologetic.

My surfaces are physical, layered materials. Paint is built up in some areas and sanded back in others, laboriously applied over a long period.

The textures and colors in my work are a balance of bronzy flesh tints and painterly hatches. Warm earth tones and cool skies are reminiscent of the clear weather and vivid landscape of my Southern California. -Sergio Teran

Phung Huynh

My work investigates multiculturalism from a kaleidoscopic perspective, a continual shift of idiosyncratic translations, cultural slippage, and the import and export of different ideologies within a multifaceted context. The contemporary American landscape is where I explore how “outside” cultural ideas are imported, disassembled, and then reconstructed. When is a swastika an extreme emblem of nationalism, or when is it a spiritual symbol in Buddhist scroll painting?  When is the Blessed Virgin Mary a sacred image, or when is it a chic/kitsch living room painting? Such questions are critical in an overwhelmingly diverse metropolis such as Los Angeles, flooded with images that, through mass reproduction and social media, take on multiple [mis]interpretations. Such reflections have guided me in re-stitching traditional Chinese iconography within the loosely woven fabric of American popular culture.

There is a purposeful “Chinatown” aesthetic in my paintings, alluding to kitsch souvenirs that tourists purchase, commodifications of eastern icons into tchotchkes. Dismantling cultural authenticity, I paint images of Chinese cherubs, lotus, carp and silk textile designs with a “pop” veneer that collide in a complicated composition of delight and horror to challenge the viewer with a western-leaning perspective, as well as the viewer with a nonwestern-leaning perspective. The works are usually of highly illuminated bodies with a lush Baroque palette, set against flat backgrounds and eastern patterns. When the viewer begins to explore the awkward synthesis and visual idiosyncrasy of my projects, notions of cultural representations and stereotypes unravel and challenge how we consume and interpret ethnographic signifiers.

Opening Night Reception: Saturday, August 9th | 7pm-10pm
Exhibition run:  August 9 through September 6, 2014