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Dialectic of Enlightenment (or, the use and abuse of history as tragedy) . San Francisco Art Fair. Lindsey Harald-Wong, Rudik Ovsepyan, Chinning Liu, Maccabee Shelley, Kento Saisho, Xiao He, objet A.D, Reisig & Taylor. April 17 – April 20, 2025. Political-Economy Project.

Fort Mason Festival Pavilion. 2 Marina Boulevard. San Francisco, CA 94123.

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A timely meditation

<< This is a parable for every individual among us. They must organize the chaos in themselves by recalling their own real needs, for themselves. Their honesty, their better and more genuine character must now and then struggle against what will be constantly repeated, relearned, and imitated. They begin then to grasp that culture can still be something other than a decoration of life, that is, basically always only pretense and disguise; for all ornamentation covers over what is decorated. So the Greek idea of culture reveals itself to them, in opposition to the Roman, the idea of culture as a new and improved Physis [nature], without inner and outer, without pretense and convention, culture as a unanimity of living, thinking, appearing, and willing. Thus, they learn out of their own experience that it was the higher power of moral nature through which the Greeks attained their victory over all other cultures and that each increase of truthfulness must also be a demand in preparation for true culture. This truthfulness may also occasionally seriously harm the idea of culture esteemed at the time; it even may be able to assist a totally decorative culture to collapse. >>

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874) [Last paragraph].

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Lindsey Harald-Wong (born: Denver, Colorado, United States) is an artist based in Malaysia, where she currently lives and works. She was formerly on the faculty of Pratt Institute and at Parsons School of Design in New York, where she taught drawing. She earned an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New York. Harald-Wong has also studied at the New York Studio School of Painting and Drawing.

Her earlier work begins at the level of perception, directly drawing from light and space and working between the limits of vision and abstraction. These earlier works were often produced around still-life imagery (such as flowers, especially orchids). Eventually, beginning in the early 2000s, around the time of the work Small Cosmos (2005) included in a group exhibition at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (Los Angeles: Fall 2024), her work starts to shift to more immediate encounters with the surface (paper, canvas) itself—and with mark-making itself—through a generative practice produced at its own pace, in response to its own processes. (Small Cosmos presents an intermediary or transitional moment between her work with perception and the works driven by abstraction.)

Living in Malaysia, Harald-Wong works in relative isolation from Western economic and social contexts of contemporary art. But within this isolation she has cultivated a practice of working-through a deep time that uniquely evolves through its own language. A cryptic, but immediate, mode of expression made of frenetic marks and webbed movements that have patiently, meditatively, morphed over many years of working in her own terms.

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Born in 1949 in Leninakan, Armenia, Rudik Ovsepyan became a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR (CCCP) in 1982, eventually being banned for his refusal to paint in the propagandistic style of “social(ist) realism” (while continuing to produce and show abstract works). From 1966-1969, he attended Terlemesyan Fine Art College in Armenia. In 1974, graduated from the prestigious state State Academy of Theatre and Fine Arts in Yerevan. Facing the widespread destruction of the 1988 Spitak earthquake, as well the evolving political turmoil surrounding his abstract painting, Ovsepyan and his family moved (by boat) to Germany in 1990, where he became a member of the Fine Art Association of Germany (in 1994). There, several solo and group presentations of his work occurred in gallery, state, and museum exhibitions. In 2000, a major exhibition of Ovsepyan’s abstract works with oil and paper produced between 1996-1999 was presented by the German ministry of Education, Science, Research and Culture of Schleswig-Holstein (presented in Kiel). Later that year, Ovsepyan immigrated to the United States and began working on new bodies of work, including Labyrinth, Magaxat, and Zaun, while also beginning to produce mixed-media sculptures.

Ovsepyan’s works are included in public and private collections in Russia, Europe, Israel, Canada, and the United States, including: UNESCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Museum of Modern Art, Armenia, Yerevan; Museum of Modern Art, Georgia, Tblisi; Sparkasse Schleswig-Holstein, Germany; Sparkasse, Muenster, Germany; Provincial Versicherung; Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Kiel, Germany.

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Chinning Liu is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and Taiwan. She received her Bachelors in Clinical Psychology at Fu Jen Catholic University. She received an Art MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Liu has exhibited her works in the Santa Clarita City “Body Presence” exhibition and the Interdisciplinary Grant program. She has participated and shown in residencies at Makotaay Eco Art Village (Hualien, Taiwan). Her artwork was featured in Voyage LA Magazine and Bold Journey Magazine.

Liu’s art focuses on the dynamic medium status between life and death. By layering fabric, gypsum, and daily necessities, creating the intimate and vulnerable sediments of individual history and collective unconsciousness. With a background in science, her work and research are often based on the hybrid impression of the human anatomy, biotic creatures, inorganic forms, and geographic scenes. Through regenerating these wrecked and organic forms, Liu’s work ambiguates the borderlines, evoking the unconscious traces left behind by time.

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Born in Los Angeles, Maccabee Shelley studied environmental and Earth sciences before earning degrees in studio art and ceramics. Intrigued by the perception and projection of value and obsolescence, Maccabee translates refuse through various materials and processes exploring the space between object, image, and experience.

Works by Maccabee have recently been exhibited in: spleen iiiii (Reisig and Taylor Contemporary: Los Angeles, California); Junque Show (Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California); Power of Ten (Steve Turner: Los Angeles, California); as well as numerous other group shows and projects in Los Angeles and Northern California (where he currently lives and works).

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Kento Saisho (he/him) is an artist and metalworker currently based in Los Angeles, CA. He makes vigorously textured and tactile sculptural objects, vessels, and contemporary artifacts in steel that utilize and push the material’s potential for transformation. Born and raised in Salinas, CA, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2016, where he was a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Following this, he completed the Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020. He was also a recipient of the inaugural Emerging Artist Cohort from the American Craft Council (ACC) in 2021 and the 2022 Career Advancement Grant from the Center for Craft. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently represented by Citron Gallery in Asheville, NC.

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Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao’s works have been exhibited internationally, including 2022 Art Capital (Paris, France), 2021 Biennale di Genova (Genoa, Italy), Upstream Gallery (New York, USA), Huacui Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai, China) and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, USA). Her artist interviews have been featured on Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, VoyageLA, and Vogue China, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program (2024) and Kala Art Institute (2023). Her mixed media artists’ book A Collection of Random Thoughts is now part of the permanent collection of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book collection in Chicago. Xiao is also a member of Oil Painters of America and served on the Apex Art New York jury panel.

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E + Z = objet A.D .

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Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor are an art duo living in Los Angeles.

Both their early works in analog photography and current works in lenticular assemblage are exhibited in galleries throughout the United States, including: The White Room Gallery (Bridgehampton); Julie Zener Gallery (Kentfield, Mill Valley); and Aspen Art Gallery (Aspen). In 2020, the founded Reisig and Taylor Contemporary as an extension of their lifelong careers as artists, collectors, and artworkers.

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A Note on Economy:

In the context of art fair exhibitions such as this, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary organizes shows as direct encounters with the market, and therefore as a unique way of facing the public and the economy. As a gallery which aims to focalize the often absent political-economic context of exhibitions as part of the literal material of the gallery-space, it is important that the gallery takes-up the space of an art fair as an opportunity to critically engage the economic structures governing the transaction and circulation of artwork. The gallery takes the context of the market as a question of how artworks circulate and what it means for an artwork to become a financial object that is wholly attached to the work of art (or at least its significance), while also having almost no relation to the object or encounter in itself. Therefore, there is the question of the work of art “before and after” the market—before it becomes something else, somewhere else. This particular problem-place of vision, desire, object, consumption, and exchange structures the critical formulation of the gallery’s art fair exhibitions.