The upcoming show at TAO ART, Liquid Dream, brings together new paintings by Benjamin Spiers and Tseng Chien-Ying, exploring unexpected affinities between two distinct practices rooted in different painting traditions. Disquieting beauty and extravagant grotesquerie converge in this surreal dialogue, where exquisite contradictions give rise to erotic tension and dreamlike mystery.
Working with oil paint, British artist Benjamin Spiers is a master of rendering fantastical forms with an uncanny sense of realism. His paintings are seductive and intimate, but also daunting in their ambiguity. Seemingly caught mid-metamorphosis, the faces and figures of human and non-human beings evoke an illusory tangibility, their saturated surfaces animated by visual rhythms and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
Taiwanese artist Tseng Chien-Ying works with ink, gouache, and mineral pigments on delicate paper, evoking more ethereal forms through his flowing brushwork and highly stylised linear language. By reimagining religious aesthetics, he creates bodily images charged with cultural and psychological meaning, where identities and desires remain fluid and unresolved. As lush as they are otherworldly, his figures convey an undercurrent of erotic desire through their glances.
Complex feelings and moods unfold through hair, ears, eyelids, lips, hands, and, most prominently, skin. Skin is both a mirror and a double of the painted surface, which itself functions almost as skin: porous and mutable, a tantalising threshold between the visible and the invisible, between consciousness and the unconscious forces at work. At once visceral and defamiliarising, both artists push recognisable human forms towards something stranger, disrupting habitual patterns of perception and creating living, hybrid forms as sites of transformation. In Liquid Dream, the body is both surface and presence as it continually emerges into pictorial space.