28 June - 25 July CROSSING 2020
Link to artist's website
Resonant of what you ask? And of course life is the answer. Covid19 intervened, isolating Lisa in Sydney with her children and husband, Jon, the Sharp part of her name. Her arrival here from Tokyo in March for a show at STACKS projects was but a single event in a life of labyrinthine crossings that began in Jesselton the capital of the British Crown Colony of North Borneo at about the time it became Kota Kinabalu the capital of the Malaysian state, Sabah. Lisa’s father, the Pang part of her name, had arrived there from China when the British North Borneo Company ruled it. He travelled on to Australia under the Colombo Plan to study Architecture at Sydney University and returned with an 8th generation first fleeter, Lisa’s mum, Janis in 1966. At 12 Lisa was delivered to Australia as a boarding school student - the antithesis of indigenous - the product of layer upon layer of “journeys” stretching across the era of colonisation that in Northern Borneo dates back to the Castillie War of 1571, half a millennium ago.
Three decades later Lisa was a lawyer, married with two children thinking about art. She graduated from N.A.S. in 2016 and changed her name; she says, to Lisa Pang on the 1st of January 2020, not out of frustration with parenthood or marriage but in acknowledgement of something that had surfaced in her art while living in Japan - a leaching of one layer into another by way of a Crossing?
It’s tempting to consider that as Lisa’s birth roughly coincided with the end of the colonial era, her work Crossing 2020 roughly coincides with the end of the paper era. Across millennia the paper scrolls of China coincide with the New York Times reporting the Covid19 crisis at the moment when paper makes way for the digital scribe. When the swipe of a credit card replaces the reverently tendered bank note. Her emphatic punctuation mark resonates with change that is as permanent as the leaves on the plane trees across the road. It marks the end and it marks the beginning.
Link to artist's website
Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)’s work Crossing 2020 is an intersection. She describes it as being “emblematic of journeys we take, back and forth between places and positions.” It’s a meditation on hiatus and diversion at the behest of the unexpected, the accidental, and the unintended, which right now is Covid19. It’s also an exclamation mark sitting, with remarkable resonance where polarities leach into each other.
Resonant of what you ask? And of course life is the answer. Covid19 intervened, isolating Lisa in Sydney with her children and husband, Jon, the Sharp part of her name. Her arrival here from Tokyo in March for a show at STACKS projects was but a single event in a life of labyrinthine crossings that began in Jesselton the capital of the British Crown Colony of North Borneo at about the time it became Kota Kinabalu the capital of the Malaysian state, Sabah. Lisa’s father, the Pang part of her name, had arrived there from China when the British North Borneo Company ruled it. He travelled on to Australia under the Colombo Plan to study Architecture at Sydney University and returned with an 8th generation first fleeter, Lisa’s mum, Janis in 1966. At 12 Lisa was delivered to Australia as a boarding school student - the antithesis of indigenous - the product of layer upon layer of “journeys” stretching across the era of colonisation that in Northern Borneo dates back to the Castillie War of 1571, half a millennium ago. Three decades later Lisa was a lawyer, married with two children thinking about art. She graduated from N.A.S. in 2016 and changed her name; she says, to Lisa Pang on the 1st of January 2020, not out of frustration with parenthood or marriage but in acknowledgement of something that had surfaced in her art while living in Japan - a leaching of one layer into another by way of a Crossing?
-Tony Twigg
My practice centres on materiality and processes, which provide both the forum and the form for engaging with the visual imagery of geometric abstraction.
This work, The Crossing is an ink on paper installation of two scrolls, placed horizontally and vertically to form a cross. It reflects on a crossing as emblematic of the journeys we take, as we go back and forth between places and positions. Paper, as a material is fundamental to the sharing of ideas and information and can take on many forms. It can be anything from a single written character to globally disseminated newspaper publications. It is ink on paper, black on white, enduring and ephemeral at the same time. While elemental, the symbol of the cross is heavy with connotations from the histories of abstraction and of spirituality. Presented here as fractured imagery, small squares torn from newspapers, it is an invitation to think about human communication and the material, visual means it manifests.
Biography:
Lisa is a Malaysian-born Australian artist currently based in Sydney and Tokyo. She works across painting, drawing, installation and performance. With an interest in materiality as a source of meaning, her work incorporates everyday things and references daily rituals in an exploration of their metaphorical potential in visual art.
Lisa Pang
June 2020
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