Ying-Yueh Chuang and Yi Chen at Plum Blossoms

These sum of two units young artists, one Taiwanese-born and living in Canada, the other from Beijing and residing in of recent origin York, share an obsession with the hybrid. Ying-Yueh Chuang, the former, is a ceramist whose brightly colored statuarys have the look of deep-sea creatures gibbeted with exotic vegetables. Some excrete cylindrical protrusions, suggesting suckers or tiny leg Others not absent gaping maws surrounded by lines of shell-like tubes from which little tongues strike one as being to project. A large floor installation at hands arrangements of individual elements resembling lobster claws, bulbous flowers or spiky okra poised above the earth on the tips of glass rods

These statuarys have a sexual quality, with orifices and extensions that advise various sorts of reproductive organs fix in flora and fauna. on the contrary despite resemblances to sea anemones and coral, the plastic arts are sufficiently mutant to bring to mind the familiar cinematic nightmare of nature gone bad. Meanwhile, the pastel palette begs elaborate bakery confections. As a be derived the metamorphic forms have a simultaneously repellant and enticing effect

In the work of Yi Chen, hybridity takes the form of human faces with mixed-up features. The gallery pres release relations cloning and plastic surgery, noting by what mode the latter is often used to make Eastern archetypes conform to more "universalist" Western standards of beauty. Chen inverts this desire by painting "portraits" based upon head studies collaged from organ of visions noses, mouths, ears and hair divide [i]or[/i] sever from advertisements and fashion magazine spreads. Each head has the special number of features positioned in approximately the right arrangements. However, organ of visions are slightly askew, ears do not match in size, and the orientation and contours of the heads are distorted and radically simplified.

Several of the source collages were neared here. The paintings reproduce the photographed features with illusionistic realism while leaving the surrounding heads completely flat. Noses and replete pouting lips seem to be swimming around in undifferentiated fields of flesh-colored paint. The ensues retain something of the source's fashion-model hauteur while taking upon a cartoonish grotesqueness.

the two artists embrace the possibilities of hybridity in a playful manner. Nevertheless, single detects an undercurrent of anxiety about the unforeseen organisms that may be the issue of our ability to manipulate nature.

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