DYSTOPIAN FORMS

Pearl Lam Galleries H Queen’s is pleased to present Dystopian Forms, a group exhibition featuring works by Du Zhenjun (b. 1961), Dale Frank (b. 1959), Jin Meyerson (b. 1972), and John Young (b. 1956). Concepts relating to utopian and dystopian worlds have invariably remained significant in the contemporary art field, spanning a great range of forms and mediums. This exhibition investigates artistic positions of anxiety, melancholy, and aspiration set against a backdrop of everchanging societal and environmental degradation. As John Young said, “The moment when a caterpillar changes into a moth, deformation and reformation exist side by side… There is a sublime, metaphysical and indescribable paradox between the one state and the other—and this change heralds two different qualities of time. Within this change, there is a melancholy. This transformation, once recognized, will never see the world of forms the same again. In this transformation, form leads to a great formlessness and then back to form yet again. And so the world goes, not kept still in ideal forms, but eternally and melancholically transforming.”