Max Wigram Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by L.A. based artist Pearl C. Hsiung. As a Taiwanese-American grown up in 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles, her works present an amalgamation of diverse visual registers deriving from Western and Asian popular culture. Manga comics, Surrealist films reminiscent of Luis Buñuel as well as of Hollywood’s Fantastic cinema in the likes of David Cronenberg are playfully assembled within a deliberately graphic and colourful language.  

The title of the exhibition To the big life’ is an extreme, unrealistic and humorous expression as if it were shouted from the front car of a rollercoaster before it takes off, or like a self-spoken mantra mumbled by an agoraphobic before leaving the house. It brings together paintings, free-standing placards and a vinyl installation which transform the gallery space into a surreal habitat filled with geological wonders: volcanoes, geysers, crystals, valleys, fissures and cavernous geodes in which life is ready to blow.

Some of the paintings depict restless cacti – for the artist a symbol of endurance - campaigning in a solitary scenario; others show metropolitan skyscrapers competing against giant crystals or attempting to tower in the middle of a sinking valley. In Kablooms (2006) the cactus seems to pitch some demands from the unimpeded territory of snowed-under hilltops, removed from its natural desert environment. Not knowing whether this is meant to be a gesture of protest, celebration or surrendering, it gives a feeling of uncertainty in the way, for instance, a white flag is jubilantly waved. Suspended between idleness and action, here there is time for peace and spontaneity, for a joke and for putting your favourite bowtie on.

Working with several media which also include video and performance (the artists has been collaborating with L.A. collective My Barbarian – please refer to: www.mybarbarian.com), Hsiung’s practice distinguishes itself for the way it desecrates psychoanalytical tropes of a sexual nature, gradually degenerating into an apparently innocent spectacle of eruptions, organs, orifices and geological forms.

Born in Taiwan in 1973, Hsiung lives and works in Los Angeles. Forthcoming exhibitions include the 2006 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Follow Me: A Fantasy, Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica (2005) and Expander, Royal Academy of Arts at 6 Burlington Garden, London (2004).