OB: WATER LINE
ob's Water Line is now open at Perrotin Hong Kong.
September 14 – November 9, 2024
ob’s world is one where tranquility pervades. Gentle hues, misty scenes, and wide-eyed, reticent girls create a sanctuary where one’s defenses quietly dissolve. Softened contours rendered in oil pastels form a blue haze, imbued with the spirit of gathered moisture. This atmosphere stirs emotions, allowing them to accumulate, ferment, and flow within. Everything in the painting morphs gradually, sometimes fading into nothingness, at other times reemerging with vivid clarity. Dreamlike yet grounded in tangible objects, these scenes navigate the delicate boundary between reality and dreamscape.
Water transcends being merely a subject in ob’s paintings; it becomes a medium. Be it a pond where water lilies bloom, a distant coastline glimpsed during a picnic, a lake traversed by boat, or a bathtub filled with water, water carries the artist’s intrinsic imaginings of matter. Delving into the essence of water, she consistently expands and draws on its fluidity, uncertainty, boundaries, and transparency. This reshapes reality with subjective distortions, all fluidly converged through water. Here, water acts as a catalyst, opening the passageway to another world.
In this world, mermaids fondle flowers by the water’s edge; little girls sprout white wings, merging with the swans in the pond; a girl peers through a hole above the water, her long braids playfully entwining with the underwater creatures’ frolics. Meanwhile, we can still recognize familiar scenes within the paintings: the harbor views of Hong Kong, the everyday window-side vistas, and the solitary figure gazing out of an airplane window, all inevitably pulling us back to reality. ob thus effectively sketches a world brimming with uncertainty.
Through her art, ob confronts the uncertainty of the world, blending the visible with the invisible in a landscape of imagination. She reveals to us that only dreams remain constant. Her creations enable us to transcend the concrete, to follow our deepest visions and feelings without restraint. These imageries, rich with genuine emotion, leave us with a sense of profound strength as we awaken from the dream.