Bai Mengfan: Almost a Love Story

New York, NY- Space 776 is pleased to present Almost a Love Story, an exhibition of new paintings by Bai Mengfan, on view from August 7th through September 9th at 37-39 Clinton Street in the Lower East Side.

The exhibition takes its name in part from the 1996 Hong Kong film, Comrades: Almost a Love Story, which tracks the peregrinations of two intertwined lives across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and New York. Mirroring her own experience of the same journey, Mengfan’s paintings are memories, fragmentary, and deconstructed evocations of vast, sometimes impersonal cityscapes. Walls in Beijing, street markings in Hong Kong, and bike lane symbols in New York when juxtaposed together recall Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, ambiguous and real contestations of the space in which her art lives. The landscapes triangulate like lovers around the artist who watches their allegiances shift and crater. Yet even amid, or perhaps in spite of, a crisis of depersonalization, the denizens of these cities anchor themselves in the deep waters of the spirit with talismans and divinities. Whether in the form of a mural depicting a conventional deity or a Pikachu decoration placed on a taxi dashboard like an effigy on an altar, Mengfan draws from liminal architecture human artifacts that make them a love story, almost.

Bai Mengfan (b.1994, China) received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her BFA in Oil Painting from Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Chengdu, China. Her works have been shown widely in the U.S. and China, including PULSE Art Fair Miami, Boers-Li Gallery, Java Project, Booth Gallery, Plus81 Gallery, Carriage Trade Gallery, SVA Chelsea Gallery, Chengdu Art Academy, White Night Gallery. Mengfan lives and works in New York.

*Visitors must keep masks on at all times and max. 4 visitors in the space at once.

Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12 pm – 6 pm

For inquiries, please contact at [email protected]