NEW YORK, NY.- To kick off the new year, Miyako Yoshinaga is presenting Coexistence, an online-exclusive exhibition featuring landscapes by four gallery artists: Jonathan Yukio Clark, Koyoltzintli, Lisa Ross, and Hai Zhang. From documenting villages on the Hawaiian coast and the indigenous cultures in New Mexico to witnessing children at the winery near Helen Mountains and the Uyghur Region surrounding the Taklamakan Desert of China. This exhibition threads through each artist’s unique cultural perspective on the interconnections between the civil and wild world. These works disintegrate the barriers between nature and city, documenting their coexisting relationship across cultures and continents, and investigating our universally physical yet ephemeral footprints in the environment.

Seeing dislocated furniture in the exterior shatters the conventional perception of civil space and urban life. Hai Zhang’s Utopia, February 2006 documents a couch left off on Highway 231 near Troy, Alabama, whereas Lisa Ross’ Ancient Tree with Bed witnesses the unique tradition of Turpan farmers sleeping in barren hills during harvesting season. The absence of human figures in both Zhang and Ross’ images calls upon the pursuit of harmonious association and reassessing the boundaries of interior and exterior spaces between civilization and the wilderness. 

Exploring individual ethnic identity and cultural heritage through interactions with the living environment is another artistic approach toward human-nature conjunction. Hawaiian-born artist Jonathan Yukio Clark’s wooden sculpture Untitled (Windows), made from native island wood, is inspired by the “shakkei” aesthetic from his Japanese heritage. Koyoltzintlil, with Ecuadorian origin, follows a similar approach in Gathering Roots and Holding Up the Sky, where she probes the intimate connection shared by Kichwa indigenous females and their Mother Earth, bonded by ancestral mythologies and storytellings. In both Clark and Koyoltzintlil’s works, the optical effects of multidimensional spaces are made by landscape manipulation, recasting the coexistence of the natural and built worlds.