1523b Webster St, Oakland
On view through July 19, 2025
The head of a lotus pod, a poppy, a closed blossom, a slow drip. Small shocks of red bleed, dot, scar, stitch, and grow across and through the body of works comprising Ground by Yameng Lee Thorp, now on view at Pt. 2 Gallery.
Sparing, not seen in every piece, and brighter than bright against the otherwise monochromatic canvases in blue-greys, blacks, and creamy ecrus, the strokes and stitches of crimson stand out in tender power, in defiance, in a pained grace. A woman’s touch in a cold harsh world, visible mending of torn lives and loves, a highlight of the beauty of our surroundings. Small but potent shocks of emotion. A visual representation of agency and reclamation, of the sort of world building “that women were never allowed to, or dared to, imagine?”
Lee Thorp’s choice to restrict her palette—quite a divergence from the highly colorful works of her prior solo show at the gallery, as seen above—was born of desire to explore “memory, lineage, and the radical potential of reclamation.” Featuring abstract landscapes and foliage, lush florals and cacti, fields and far-off cities, and the occasional could-be face or handprint, the collection is transportive, catapulting viewers from a white gallery space to somewhere more heavily graded, greyer, complex and swirling with heavy emotions.
Throughout, there is a fluidity of ink washing under greasy, satisfyingly uneven pastel marks, loose flung petals and streaky stamens. Two beets, nestled close for comfort (Field notes from a vanishing world) and tears of snow in a craggy wet confusion (Unsaid things, falling like snow on my mind) sit in concert with a hazy mirror to the unknown (Ghost Map) and the search for connection beyond oneself in a pond (Living, remembering, forgetting). Lee Thorp’s contrast of hard and soft, halting and endless, of flowing, living forms with ghostly scratches, imprints, soot, creates worlds far more complex than the frames they cover. She brings the work beyond the edges, wrapped and continued beyond our access, a hidden world just out of view.
Not for us, perhaps. Or for us to dream and imagine, or to reach one day (upon purchase, when it’s your right to grope the pieces and inspect every which way).
A levity and heaviness intertwined, with scale thrown to the wind in service of feeling. Disorienting, gauzy and lush and dark and tender, Ground provides a window into another world, where process and peace and familial and regional bonds coexist, beautifully.
