The salt is on the briar rose
2024.11.07 - 2024.11.10
Artist: Sonia Jia
Curator: Wang Haoyang
Cub_ism_ Artspace is willing to present Sonia Jia’s Solo Project The Salt is on the briar rose at Westbund Art Fair. The exhibition starts from November 7th to Nove mber 10th, 2024.
The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch.
Salt is a common and essential seasoning, as ubiquitous as human emotions. Saltwater is a remedy for all, as it contains both sweat and tears. In the realm of emotions, salt symbolizes pain, as any intimate and lasting love inevitably involves sorrow. The rose is the embodiment of happiness, a blend of vibrant beauty and the withering of pain. Sonia’s paintings, much like "salt is on the briar rose," capture the seemingly beautiful yet contradictory dynamics within the intimate relationships. Sometimes, those wounds are unavoidable, but when documented and healed, they can transform into a more resilient and uplifting strength.
This exhibition is inspired by a novel recently read by the artist, called The Summer When General Winter Arrives. The story generates from female protagonist, who, after experiencing unspeakable pain and horror, imagines her deceased grandmother returning to accompany her. With her grandmother and her grandmother’s friends, she embarks on new adventures, through this, experiencing different interpretations of death. The installation, Whispering beneath the grandma’s quilt, extracts a part of what the grandmother says to the protagonist and the artist excerpt part of the text, forming a “woven letter.” The artist believes that these words, mixed with the grandmother’s fantasies from when she was alive, resemble a deeply private way for the protagonist to heal herself after the trauma which the artist gets healed in this process.
Between 2023 and 2024, Lilyjon tampered with the work in video form, creating Southerly Breeze Video, that nearly half an hour long. The artist breaks the linear narrative from the inside and re-tells another bizarre story through images, poems and dialogues scattered throughout the work. The video reveals the inner struggle of the characters and their search for the meaning of life, as well as the artist's profound thoughts on issues such as history and memory, youth and love, ideals and destiny, and death and transcendence.
What is truly remembered amid the ruins? On historical monuments, the engraved names are the significance, yet there are countless others worthy of remembrance who remained obscure. The monumental nature explored in Sonia's paintings focuses on people and things beyond the mainstream that deserve to be remembered. The foundational definition of a monument is associated with concepts of eternity, grandeur, and stillness. After being reinterpreted by the artist, the monumental nature placed in the artwork is a construction for future generations and a deconstructive continuity of past influences. For the artist, the interpretation of monumentality does not emerge solely from a macro perspective; rather, it transforms into a symbol of post-traumatic healing after a personal reinterpretation.
The primary meaning of "monumentality" is to closely connect art with political and social life. The concept of a monument's form here is weakened in its true encompassing meaning, allowing it to take any form. In Sonia’s works, whether the colors resemble bruises from past trauma or the ethereal, flowing brushstrokes, they remain “engraved” on the canvas. Scars on the skin may heal, but memories cannot be erased. At this moment, the artist transforms seemingly fleeting pain and time into permanently preserved paintings in a metaphorical way, so, each piece that the audience sees can be regarded as an existence of monumentality.
"Every artwork, without exception, is a historical artifact because it represents a specific stage in the development of visual arts." The understanding of historical artifacts is the same in reverse: people's lives and histories exist in continuous phases, with each phase containing the essence of the next. The artist’s creative process follows this similar pattern. Sonia's works are full of vitality, not in the literal sense of life, but rather as a form of continuity, placing them in the eternal flow of time through various forms and expressions. Ultimately, the seemingly fragmented content is not purely negative or sorrowful, but it represents the precious courage for collective healing after the smoke has cleared.
