黑料不打烊

The art world might be more strictly Platonic today than it has ever been – perhaps more than artists themselves are inclined to accept. Try as I might, I struggle to think of another time in history when “form” and “matter” have been more completely and dogmatically separated than in the last century or so. As a culture, I worry that we have taken this idea to the point of absurdity.

I’ve made no secret of my concerns about the widening divide between popular or commercial art and its “fine” counterpart. It remains fashionable among the higher levels of the industry to deconstruct art into ever-more basic components – an enterprise that has often resulted less in an improved appreciation of what art is and far more often in a defeated admission of what it is not. Or, even worse, it has rejected definition altogether, renouncing not only thematic significance but also fundamental principles and techniques.

People, by and large, no longer feel they understand art. They don’t think it’s meant for the world they inhabit. Visual art is inherently the most incarnational creative outlet we have. It is, at its core, a distilling of matter into form. By some sacred mystery, we are blessed to interpret it as meaning. Humans have spent millennia wondering at this creative impulse – and now, we’ve spent the last several decades dissecting its pieces, charting its borders, and sounding its depths. But in divorcing matter so thoroughly from form, we’ve come dangerously close to losing art itself.

Or at least, that is the argument I usually have to make. I’m often confronted with a market that prioritizes the shocking, innovative, and never-before-seen – or conversely, counter-movements that seem to want to pretend the last century never happened. Among these groups, I generally find myself motivated to highlight the key interplay of matter and form in the visual arts. As such, it’s rare that I find myself in a space calm and inquisitive enough to approach the other side of the question – the endless horizon peeking through the slatted fence, which surely has compelled artists across time to work toward the perfection of their craft, and which has become so axiomatic in our present time that we’ve, paradoxically, forgotten that it’s worth asking: What are the limits of the material? When does the “incarnational” aspect of art break down? When can we, to put it in Platonic terms, see the forms through the matter?

This is a subtly different question than the one many people today are asking. It seeks to define not art itself but its boundaries. Like any mode of creative expression, there are some ideas that are better suited to visual interpretation than others, and though there are infinitely many ways in which those ideas may be communicated, there are infinitely more in which they may not. Instead of pushing art to its breaking point, it might be far more fruitful to explore and nurture it, as we would with any of our human relationships.

Uffner & Liu gallery in New York is currently hosting an exhibition, , which I find embodies this attitude at a level I’ve rarely seen. According to the gallery’s press release, it is

a group exhibition that explores the dual forces of the sun and moon – radiant and reflective, irrefutable and elusive – as they move in continual dialogue across the sky and through the human psyche. These celestial bodies, long central to the visual, spiritual, and scientific vocabularies of cultures across time, serve here as metaphoric and material anchors for a range of inquiries – mythological, phenomenological, ecological, and affective.

Laurie Nye, Le Bosquet in Pink and Emerald, 2024

The features a range of highly talented artists, including painters and sculptors in several media, as well as some more experimental artists. While all of them deserve to be highlighted (and I encourage you to visit the exhibition or its webpage to view their work), I was able to connect with two for this article, Piper Bangs and Laurie Nye, as well as Lucy Liu, the gallery's recently announced Partner and curator of the exhibition – the first she’s curated in her time as Partner.

I noticed quickly that the unique personalities, interests, and journeys of each artist (and I would like to refer to Liu also as an artist here, since her eye and decisions were as essential as any of the exhibition’s contributors to its success!) seem to play a key role in the show’s unique and refreshing perspective.

Katie Paterson, Ideas (The Milky Way Compressed into a Diamond), 2019

Liu developed an appreciation for the art industry a bit later than many, falling in love with the gallery space after being exposed to it in college. Perhaps it is her joint perspective – first as an artistic “convert” of sorts and now as an experienced insider – that has given her the instinct to allow artists to explore their areas of interest within Solar Music / Lunar Revel's broad theme. “Some artists,” she said, “approached the theme through landscapes, others through mythology, and others, like Katie Paterson, through science – asking, for example, what elements make up a star, or how we measure geological time.” The sun and moon, she sees as both inspirations for “artmaking” and as sources of meaning and our (literal!) orientation in the world. “There’s an urgency now around how we relate to the natural world,” she continued, “how we place ourselves within larger systems – planetary, geological, emotional. This exhibition offers a poetic lens through which to think about those questions.”

With its theme centered around the celestial bodies that form such a visceral, tangible part of the human experience – and yet remain firmly beyond our grasp – it may not be so surprising that Liu treated the exhibition as a special kind of ecosystem. Its contributing artists each play a role; their works stand as much in conversation with each other as they do alone, and it’s difficult to speak about one without speaking about the others.

Piper Bangs, Guttation, 2025

At the same time, however, each artist approaches the theme from an individual perspective. For , whose evocative painting Guttation hangs in the gallery, her motivations are historical and conversational. She explains, “I like to think of a painting as a place for a conversation to happen. I start with usually a really specific narrative I’ve written out that I then make play out with ambiguous forms.” We see her method at play in Guttation.

The painting is part of her Beautiful Fruit series, named after a quote from Renoir: “my goal in painting the nude is to paint them as beautiful fruit.” It has a surreal, slightly eerie, yet fantastic atmosphere. “Guttation,” Bangs explains,

is a process where fungi release excess fluid from their bodies in the form of beautiful, sometimes-colored droplets … I thought of this process as a sort of catharsis, like crying. It seems like a guttural expelling of what there’s an excess of internally or emotionally. The narrative of the painting centers around one figure-fruit comforting another that’s guttating, or crying.

Despite at a glance seeming to have little to do with the human experience, with its disorienting use of color, light, and form, Bangs’ piece expresses a connection not only with the artistic tradition but also with some of the most visceral, emotional moments of our lives. What is it, the painting asks, that allows us to engage on an empathetic level with what ought to be abstract shapes on a canvas?

Laurie Nye, Emo Landscape XVI, 2024

, too, pushes the limits of our ability to perceive our tangible reality in simple aesthetic forms. Art, she says, “is about the potential of something else, and now is the time to take risks. We need to start again from the ground up and give more people access to the experience of what art can be.” Her process is, by her own admission, very non-linear. She spends her days attuned to aesthetic principles in the world around her, collecting in particular “ideas about color,” which she keeps in a folder containing “anything from historical paintings, graphic images or vintage interiors, it’s all over the place.” Solar Music / Lunar Revel contains two of her paintings, Emo Landscape XVI and Le Bosquet in Pink and Emerald. From a distance, the viewer’s eye seeks to find structure and meaning in the pieces – they feel almost like realistic, albeit stylized depictions of places in vivid colors. But up close, even this foothold begins to loosen as components separate and the view becomes delineated as a series of undulating shapes.

Christian Franzen, Wall of Sound, 2023

Besides Bangs and Nye, the exhibition contains pieces across many styles, from Christian Franzen’s hyperrealistic paintings with murky overtones and elusive contexts, to Wanda Koop’s clear and texture-rich depictions of space, to Angela Wei’s unique takes on fantasy. It also features two text-based pieces by Katie Paterson, each cut out of sterling silver.

Wanda Koop, Umbra, 2024

And this is where the beauty of Solar Music / Lunar Revel’s design truly comes into play. As Liu put it, for her, an exhibition is “a vision [that] becomes reality – when something that existed only as an idea or a sketch in your mind becomes tangible, spatial, and most importantly, shared.” When it finally goes up, “[the] potential energy suddenly converts into something kinetic.” Each artist’s work reflects a different approach to art and engagement with meaning. Individually, they evoke distinct reactions from the viewer. Bangs’ Guttation engages with the heart of the human experience; Nye’s Emo Landscape XVI pushes the boundary of our ability to perceive objects aesthetically. Other pieces, like Paterson’s Ideas, stretch the definition of visual art almost to the point of breaking. But together, their perspectives enter a constructive conversation that is more than the sum of its parts.

Angela Wei, Down the Rabbit Hole, 2025

Much like the moon reflects the sun’s light, and the sun nurtures our planet, and the tides follow the moon, and countless other invisible and unnoticed connections maintain our reality and allow our lives to flourish, so this exhibition seems to gesture toward that mysterious relationship between artist, art, and viewer. It is not bound by its material, nor is it limited to it. But at the same time, for whatever reason, the material is the means through which we can sense it and engage with it. Solar Music / Lunar Revel is notable not because it seeks to define what art is or who we are or how anything exists, but because it offers a seat at the table, allowing viewers to enter these big questions, guiding them through the material to an experience of the immaterial and transcendent. Without positing solutions, it invites us to a contemplation of facets of existence that are beyond our ability fully to grasp.

That, I’d argue, is what art should be – or at least, it is probably closer to what Plato would have preferred.

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