LACUNAE

This December, we are delighted to welcome back Yoshi Coryne for his third showing at Chinatown Soup. Lacunae consists of oil paintings and graphite drawings created within the past two years. Please join us for an opening reception on Thursday, December 2nd from 7 to 9pm.

Mining antiquity asks us to embrace mysterious gaps in the art historical record. We know Greek sculpture, for example, mostly through Roman copies. Yoshi sifts through iconic works of this stitched Pagan past to reveal continuity as a matrix of revival and reclamation that seeks beyond atavism and irredentism.

By selecting myths of loss (i.e. Pyrrha/Deucalion diptych) alongside cropping and siloing (i.e. Flies in Olympus series) in primary reference to the Quattrocento and late Baroque periods, Yoshi weaves together gaps, or lacunae, to offer an original way of storytelling the birth of the Western canon. His imagination guides a creative process that animates idiomatic legacies into fluid contemporary expressions.

Yoshi’s epochal movement from the Classical to the Mannerist also reflects what is timeless in the artist’s own quality of experience. Works in Lacunae were created during a new period of collective impermanence and uncertainty, which included loss of work and a prodigal return to New York for the artist, making this show a personal exploration of how cessation is an opportunity for creation.

Yoshi Coryne (b. 1987) is a Brooklyn-based artist who draws inspiration from Old Masters and Classical history. His work also derives from the rich traditions of his Japanese and Middle Eastern heritage and rejects an East-West binary. Yoshi seeks to expand connections hidden in plain sight, particularly in the decidedly White and heteronormative tropes of Classic and Enlightenment art. When the artist isn’t getting carpal tunnel, he is usually ruining his eyesight and posture with Netflix or computer games.