Little bits of tenderness by Jake Yang & Intertidal zone by Aleksandra Antić
Jake Yang
Jake Yang is an emerging artist born in Adelaide, Kaurna Land and currently practicing at Floating Goose Studios inc.
Yang’s practice explores various disciplines, notably oil painting, sculpture and installation.
His practice is driven by the continual exploration of queer and youth culture in contemporary society, integrated with strong influence from his conservative traditional Chinese culture. Yang challenges the normative assumptions around identity through his exploration of existing within in three very different cultures at once (Chinese, Australian and queer cultures). His practice explores the evolving cross-section within himself.
Yang explores contemporary ways of painting, through formal elements, subject matter and celebrating safe spaces through figures in nature. He explores key themes of intimacy, privacy, freedom, and rebellion in his practice.
This is Jake Yang’s world. We’re just living in it.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion”, writes Mary Oliver in her collection of essays, Upstream. I’m probably more qualified to comment on literary art than visual, but what I do know is that Jake’s artistic practice is grounded in the art of attention. Attention to detail, to light and shadow. Attention to the world around him, and to the world inside of him. His practice is often centred on the intersection between aspects of his identity — blending elements of Chinese and queer cultures. In this exhibition, we see that play out in familiar imagery from Chinese art traditions, modified to evoke a certain femininity: clouds, rendered delicately in pink, puffy fabric. In his still life painting, depicting a cluttered nightstand, we catch an intimate glimpse into the artist’s inner world, laying bare his private space in its raw, unposed authenticity.
Through his portrait work, we are invited to witness the fabric of a queer relationship through the artist’s perspective. We see the subject from his profile, from above, from behind, from a distance. There is an intimacy, a vulnerability, to this perspective, and something of a spontaneity — indicative of those small, ordinary moments spent with someone you love. Stepping back for a moment, observing them in their candidness, their everyday beauty. One of Jake’s strongest capabilities as an artist is to capture this moment — and more than that, this feeling, this intimacy — to pin it down, to seal it in oil paint, to preserve it.
The natural world is also integral to the texture of Jake’s world — evoking a sense of tranquillity, of nature as a safe space, a sacred space, where tenderness can blossom like wildflowers.
But what I think is most interesting about this exhibition is the question of framing — how our world is framed by these little bits of tenderness. Arrows pin a canvas to the wall, eliciting images of cupid, and a pink ribbon frames the subject’s head — both further nods to femininity and tenderness in queer male culture. The subject, elsewhere, surrounded by the lush green of a field; elsewhere, a forest — the painting overflowing onto the frame that contains it, covering the hard edges with soft brush strokes. And isn’t that what tenderness does? Paints over the hard edges of our days with its softness. Encompasses the people we love. Pins us to this world, to each other. Wraps itself around us, like a ribbon.
It is through the art of attention that we notice these little details, these little bits of tenderness — like finding tiny, delicate wildflowers in a field, crouching to pick them. And if you’re like Jake, or Mary — if the work of your life is rooted in this noticing, this paying attention — eventually, I think, you end up devoting yourself to it, and it becomes the framework of your life. And your life, in turn, just grows even more tender. As tender as the cushions of clouds. As tender as the green field, the safe space. As tender as the face of someone you love.
Chris Jaksa
Jake Yang, Picking Daisies, 2024, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jake Yang, Precious, 2024, oil on board. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jake Yang, miffy still life, 2024, oil on board. Image courtesy of the artist.
Aleksandra Antić
Aleksandra Antić is a multidisciplinary artist currently living on Peramangk Land. Her work often explores concepts of repetition and performativity in terms of our capacity for action and cultivation of resilience, a concern rooted in the experiences of her mother as a textile industry worker, the collapse of Yugoslavia, migration and illness. Her current focus is on cultural and bodily knowledge as alternative ways of thinking with the present and working towards embracing the state of not knowing and the unknowable.
Aleksandra holds BVA Honours (First Class, 2012) and MVA by Research (2018) as Australian Postgraduate Award recipient at the University of SA. She has exhibited at GRAD European Centre for Culture and Debate (Belgrade, Serbia), Fremantle Arts Centre (WA), FELTspace, Nexus Arts, SASA gallery, Artspace gallery (Adelaide Festival Centre), Newmarch Gallery and West Gallery Thebarton. Aleksandra has been a recipient of the Country SA Breaking Ground Professional Development Award (2013) and has recently undertaken a residency at Sauerbier House.
Notes from the intertidal zone
i.
When Aleksandra holds too much water in her mouth she feels the liquid changing her, pushing her cheeks until they distend and become bladders. It is uncomfortable, but it feels good.
ii.
To move like a river: group an assemblage of trembling bodies, swelling voices, and swinging limbs; call up a welling up of feeling until saturation is reached; allow yourselves to be carried away by it.
iii.
Rituals arriving in the afterimage of trauma might provide catharsis, healing, or repair. They are happenings in which species intermingle, where bread is made for other-than-human bodies, and people collaborate with environmental forces. Most often guarded by women, their performative poetry offers the possibility of slipping outside of oneself. Aleksandra thinks with Slavic water rituals from the place she was born. She remembers her mother throwing water after her for luck as she walked out the door and tells of troubles gently wiped from face to cloth, to be left fluttering like ghostly riverside monuments. This body of work began in an elbow of Ngankipari /Onkaparinga River on residency at Sauerbier House. Here at POP Gallery the artworks are quieter, contemplative offerings left in the wake of that time.
iv.
Welcome to the intertidal zone where the sea and the river mix. We have come to the estuary and to the mangrove. There is no place for a picturesque beachside holiday on these maternal mudflats. Here fish babies are born to an insect chorus, and it smells of fecundity and rot. There is nothing genteel about birth. The cleaving of one into more holds the optimistic violence of coming alive, of robust life surging onwards, again. This is place that knows both the world of the sea and the push of the river. It is full, cool, and salty one day, tepid and low the next. Living amid constant change is a feature of the intertidal zone.
v.
During her time on Ngankiparingka/Onkaparinga, Aleksandra watched a black swan pull up morsels, its long neck crossing between the air and an underwater world. There is an inverted parallel between white swans in the land where she was born and the black swans of Kaurna Yerta. The trauma of colonial violence haunts both countries. Aleksandra holds that black swan in mind when she pulls images, sounds and intensities from her time with the river into this gallery. She surrenders to instinct and feeling, making unsettled peace with this time and place by carrying out careful rituals that are needed, like water.
Sasha Grbich
Sasha is a mid-career artist, writer and lecturer at the Adelaide Central School of Art. She is a regular contributor to Artlink Magazine, amongst other critical review publications, and recently co-authored Waikfield Press's publication on Helen Fuller (2023).
Aleksandra Antić, hold, 2024, still image from single channel video with sound, on two screens, duration: 7min 45sec. Produced with the support of the Onkaparinga Council.
Aleksandra Antić, upwelling (detail, indicative), 2024, ink and water on paper, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.