The Cheryl McGinnis Gallery presents the work of Hu Bing and Xin Song, two Chinese women artists whose work explores domestic environments, a concept strongly recognized by this gallery. Through a cross-cultural perspective, they create works that alter the traditional function of objects and media, revealing a society that often feels rampant with aggressive actions and imagery.

Hu Bing’s glass installations of Japanese wine bottles, tables, and containers often combine latex and upholstery-like embedded flower petals, employ light as an intrinsic element. Hu Bing first decided to use windshield glass as a medium when she arrived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, some 15 years ago. She was shocked by the level of chaos on the street in terms of cars that had their windshields broken and destroyed. She saw the windshield as paper and the lines like a drawing. Her process is to take glass, cover it with latex and then take a hammer and smash it. Hu Bing works the hammer like a pencil determining what happens to the line. She then seals the sheet of glass with resin. She cuts open a wine bottle and slides the sheet of glass in. Hu Bing is interested in the play of 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional objects. What is full? What is empty? What can be contained? She questions what is translucent and what is transparent. For Hu Bing using a hammer and glass is a metaphor for breaking the form of traditional Chinese painting and drawing.

Xin Song takes the ancient folk-art of China, paper cut and brings it into contemporary context by borrowing pictures from a variety of magazines, domestic, fashion, pornography, car, political, technology. While collecting images for the paper cuts, she considers each small piece and its meaning both in and out of context of the larger piece. Xin Song, sees, thinks, feels about the world through magazines which we all glance at and toss aside. She takes scissor and exacto knife to her medium and breaks the existing form, she then creates a new form that is as sublime for its beauty as it is for its process. Xin Song has found an importance and value in these materials and the way they mirror the world around us.

By appropriating and blending Chinese traditions and techniques each artist offers tactile hybrids of drawing, painting and sculpture that break free of all culture boundaries powerfully emerging with the universal identity of contemporary art.