Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Softly - a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based painter Adrian Kay Wong. Joining the gallery for his debut solo presentation, his work is used as a conduit to focus the viewers’ attention to the small, soft moments in everyday life, paying tribute to the overlooked and ephemeral.
Stories and narratives slowly unfurl like drifting smoke, building characters and internal worlds in each canvas. Formal elements of composition, color and form are brought to the fore by Wong’s precise and thoughtful paintings transmuting the mundane into the sublime. Scenes of quiet introspection are distilled down to their essential forms, asking the viewer to consider and decipher each detail and composition.
Evening light slants in from an open window on a table left with sake glasses, cigarettes and a forgotten phone. The ritual of preparing coffee and juice is left to cast shadows across a counter in the early morning sun. Desks and surfaces are strewn with the objects of a day’s tasks, the only vestiges to hint at actions just out of frame. Wong describes the work as, "Moments that lays just outside of our attention, where upon being noticed the spell of the scene vanishes. The instance just before or after a secret moment that happens when we leave a room and the magic and glow of it that we can never quite perceive in the fleeting scene.”
Each painting is the product of daily existence, elevating peripheral vignettes to center stage. Drawing inspiration from the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki, the artist sees “shadows, emptiness and silence as undervalued qualities that make a space beautiful.” The brevity and simplicity allow one to view the elegance, subtlety and beauty in the everyday moments that drift through our lives quietly, softly.
Adrian Kay Wong, Morning [Juice (left), Coffee (right)], 2023$ 13,000.00
