PATRON is proud to announce the other, our first solo exhibition with Chicago based artist Miao Wang (b. 1988). Wang’s materially committed practice honors a human, physical relationship to the passage, and reality of time. Working largely with materials that hold material connections to historical and contemporary Chinese aesthetic traditions, filtered through the Western monochromatic canon, Wang has developed a unique conceptual language of abstraction. In the other, Wang presents four distinct bodies of work, each representing the artist’s relationship, through repeated gesture, to notions of doubling, kindred beings, or, in her words, “an expression, and it's shadow.” 

Wang’s delicate watercolor paintings are developed through the repetitive physical engagement with sheets of synthetic YUPO paper, water, and pigment. The layers upon layers of nearly translucent washes, capture minute shifts within the physical conditions and environment of the studio, traces of dust, light, temperature and humidity. Documents of the artist’s experience with it and on it, the surfaces’ abstract marks evidence the environmental and physical conditions that impact the creative process, in the way that our bodies bear the residue of our memories and emotions. 

In the initial gallery, seven of Wang’s red watercolors form a serial grouping. Using layers of the same mixed pigment on mass-produced paper in predetermined sizes, subtle differences emerge across the paintings’ surfaces, calling attention to the minute details of individuality in each, such as the artist’s finger marks along the edges of the paintings, residue of her process. This communion of similarity and difference disperses in the next gallery, where Wang presents a complete grouping of diptychs– two paintings which are intended to be installed together–oppositionally across the gallery from each other. In producing these diptychs, Wang doubles her process, performing the same gesture twice. Each painting is unique, while echoing and negating the other’s uniqueness. 

the other coalesces with a series of watercolor paintings formed initially by two pooled black watercolor dots. Through a gentle bending of the YUPO paper, each pool runs across the surface into fragmented limb-like markings. Wang’s forms here begin with two fingerprint-like spots which bleed into the otherworldly, and the tenuous, capital “I” of the self. The tension between the self and the other culminates in a pair of monolithic cyanotypes on drywall panels, developed in ​​an outdoor environment by moonlight. Each surface reveals subtle differences of light, shadow, and atmosphere—distinct experiences within our shared cosmic time against the mass-produced world of language and architecture.