Mendes Wood DM New York: Opening soon in New York

The knots of Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s silk paintings are the kind that get tighter the harder you pull to loosen them. When you know just a little—your mind slackened—they seem simple enough: here are some with repeating horizontal bars, like a woolly Stella or LeWitt. Line, line, line. Palermo, Kelly, Buren. When you draw nearer, pull a little harder, things become more complicated. It works a little like what they call close-up magic: these paintings’ uncanny details multiply the closer you come. Apparently solid lines turn out to be streaked with tears of naphtha, cobalt, dissipated by a celadon marine layer or the sienna haze of evening; ochre stains bloom; a fine mist of dots here and there, as if their acrylic had been exhaled not painted. There are too many surface effects to take full stock, and then, at the edges, the outline of wooden braces appears, bones beneath taught skin. So that silk ground isn’t ground really but maybe a net that catches what it can or a veil that cloaks confessions. Those surface stripes are in fact closer to transcriptions than geometry: each set is one of the 64 soothsaying texts of the I-Ching. A broken line stacked atop five solid ones comes from #43 (Breakthrough), a pictogram of a lake below a cracked sky and a spell for pushing past creative block: 

One must resolutely make the matter known

At the court of the king.  

It must be announced truthfully. Danger. 

 
It is necessary to notify one’s own city.

  
It does not further to resort to arms.  

It furthers one to undertake something.

– an excerpt from the curatorial text by A.E. Benenson

Opening soon at Mendes Wood DM New York

Friday, Jan 17, 2025

6 pm – 8 pm

Leah Ke Yi Zheng

I-Ching/Machine

47 Walker Street

New York, USA

Art Fair

FOG Design + Art 2025

Booth 302

Alma Allen, Paloma Bosquê, Lygia Clark, Sonia Gomes, Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Mimi Lauter, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Paulo Monteiro, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Antonio Obá, Marina Perez Simão, Leticia Ramos, Maaike Schoorel, Peter Shear, and Paula Siebra

Jan 23 – 26, 2025

Fort Mason Pier 2 and Pier 3  

San Francisco, USA

On the cover: Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Untitled (no.49/revolution), 2024, Acrylic on silk over mahogany stretcher, 190.5 x 208.3 cm | 75 x 82 in

Source: Mendes Wood DM