Me & My Plurals: Yosub Koh and Angela Fang Zirbes

How would you describe a person? 

You may define your relationship with them, come up with several adjectives to outline their personality, or bring up some stories to support your impressions of them. Describing a person takes several steps, just like painting a figure. Starting from sketching out a contour, the artist wants to flourish the canvas with dots, lines, and shapes. These also take time, and a lot could happen when one flourishes a figure. Personal relationships might be reconsidered, adjectives that outline a personality might be consolidated or challenged, and stories of the person’s past might be rediscovered. 

A figure is never just a face. Never just a nose, a mouth, two ears, two eyes, and two eyebrows within an oval. A figure is a person’s plural: multiple static images, multiple persons at different times of the past, multiple connections with others and the surroundings, and multiple brushstrokes infused with the artist’s emotions and memories. 

This exhibition at LATITUDE Gallery features the figure paintings of Yosub Koh and Angela Fang Zirbes, whose works challenge the conventional approaches to figures and identity which tend to be singular and teleological, and suggests that everyone is “Me & My Plurals.” 

A threat we face in contemporary society is the oversimplification of personhood in our daily and professional lives. We are first reduced to human resources, and then categorized into different titles meant to serve certain functions. Such a condition only deteriorates in the digital society. In the name of efficiency and convenience, we are turned into data in various forms of polls and algorithms. A person becomes nothing more than a tenant to the property owner, a view to the influencer, or a vote to the politician, but never an active and solid person with emotions, senses, histories, and thoughts. 

Facing the oversimplification and objectification of personhood, the Martiniquian decolonial philosopher Édouard Glissant proposes opacity as a way of social interaction that embraces plurality. In contrast with transparency, which is criticized by Glissant as a colonial approach to “study” the marginalized indigenous people and tends to settle a hasty stereotypical and Eurocentric judgment, opacity acknowledges the plurality of everyone without forcing anyone to be explicit about oneself or interpreting the building blocks of one’s personhood. This exhibition therefore employs opacity as a method to approach the painted figures, the paintings, and the artists in a poetic manner that embraces their plurality without generalization. 

Yosub Koh’s paintings bring the conventional figure paintings into question. While most figure paintings present a momentary and static view of a person, Koh’s figures exist in a duration of time that appear in front of the audience as a moving and changing plurality of figures. He experiments with the Korean traditional hanji paper, which becomes translucent after applied with gel. Benefited by this material quality, the artist aligns several sheets of paper each painted with a different figure of a person, and the figures are able to merge into one as the lower layers appear in the upper ones. While the individual figure captures the person at a moment, the layering brings a more vivid person to the audience. 

Sensitive and thoughtful toward his reading and social experiences, Koh believes that a person should be understood as a plurality, a figure with multiple sentiments, movements, and opaque social relations all at once. His figures always negotiate with their past selves, which constantly haunt and reshape their identities. Such a philosophy is visualized through his paintings, in which he portrays random strangers from a bar, a friend of his, his girlfriend, or himself by painting the poetic plurality of the actual person through communicating and feeling the person. 

Angela Fang Zirbes’s paintings suggest alternative answers to Koh’s question. While her previous works focus on the theme of fear and privacy in domestic scenes, her recent group of works walks outside of the house with curiosity and interacts with subject matters that are key to shaping and negotiating her identity. In black and white colors, the artist paints the rural scenes in her hometown in Iowa where she is currently based, and merges her mother’s Chinese background into portraying her body. In her tranquil and surreal storytellings, her hair becomes the field, her face becomes the flowers, and her body becomes an active site for the exchange of nature, biographical history, and emotions. 

Here in Fang Zirbes’s paintings, plurality is in the vast expanded field of the figure. While the facial expression of her self portrait stays calm, the artist outsources her self-expression onto recurring subject matters such as the abandoned and haunted house, the field, the animals and plants, and the overcasts which would stand for personal and private discussions around her past, her connections with living environment, or her complex moods that cannot be articulated in one or two words. Fang Zirbes’s paintings can therefore be read as poems, and through embedding her message of self-expressions in the poetic topos, she leaves us at an open-ended point of imagination for an appreciation of plurality. 

In Koh and Fang Zirbes’s paintings, we can see a shared interest in expanding the painting medium’s magic of conveying a plural of messages through graphic language. In doing so, they push figure painting to a frontier that overcomes its impossibility to carry a figure’s plurality within a single frame. By appreciating their paintings, we rediscover the joy to always be curious about others and think about others as a true path toward preserving each other’s humanity in this rapidly digitizing world.