Qualia Contemporary Art

“Gold Mountain”by LYU Peng is a visual symphony of vermilion and dark green hues, masterfully capturing a man in sunglasses poised on a floating red wall stage. The composition juxtaposes a resplendent gold mountain against desolate ruins, with a sundial symbolizing the passage of time and a poetic plum tree adding a touch of elegance. A divine beam of light from behind the curtain bathes the scene, enhancing its dramatic depth and symbolizing the illusion of reality through different perspectives. Each meticulously crafted detail invites profound contemplation and poetic reflection.

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Image: LYU Peng, “Gold Mountain”, 2023. Ink and Chinese Color on silk, Framed: 131.8 x 92.7 x 5.1 cm, 51.88 x 36.5 x 2 in

In art, are lions, deer, and leopards merely animals? Certainly not. Throughout art history, an animal depicted on canvas can encompass a wide range of meanings - from elegance and temptation to brutality. Though these contradictory interpretations might seem to obscure the message of a painting, they also serve as evidence of the long and rich tradition of animal symbolism in art.

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Image: LYU Peng, Sika Deer, 2023, Ink and Chinese Color on Silk, 23.03 x 46.85 in.

✨Thank you to everyone who joined the event co-hosted by The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) , East West Bank .us, and our gallery for our showcase of “All Together Now: Celebrating AAPI Voices in Contemporary Art.“ We hope you thoroughly enjoyed the incredible artwork and the opportunity to engage in intimate conversations with the talented Asian American artists featured.

✨Special thanks to The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) and East West Bank for collaborating with our gallery to present such a meaningful group exhibition, bringing together the works of 14 AAPI artists.

✨We are excited to announce that the exhibition has been extended through July 5. Don’t miss the chance to visit the gallery and experience this exceptional showcase again!

🌟 Thank you to everyone who joined us last Sunday for the AAPI Artist Talk at our gallery!

🌟We deeply appreciate our six talented artists .xiaoze for their inspiring contributions and for moderating the talk.

🌟We hope everyone had a wonderful afternoon.

Special thanks to the upper level members of the Palo Alto Art Center for visiting us last Saturday! Your presence and enthusiasm made it a memorable experience for all of us! Thank you for your continuous support of us! 🫶

📢Please join us on Sunday, June 2 from 3 - 4:30 pm in our gallery for an artist talk which will be moderated by Naz Cuguoglu , the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

Artists Michael Arcega , Masako Miki , Rupy C. Tut , Xiaoze Xie .xiaoze , Stella Zhang , and ZHENG Chongbin will share with us about their art practice！

Our current group exhibition All Together Now: Celebrating AAPI Voices in Contemporary Art features the work of 14 exceptional Asian-American artists. Working in a diverse array of media and exploring a variety of themes and ideas, these 14 artists exemplify the wealth and breadth of talent among contemporary Asian-American artists.

The exhibition extended through July 5th!

📍229 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301

Now on view

🧑‍🎨YANG Jiechang: Beneath the Golden Antlers
📅5.18.24 ~ 6.28.24
📍229 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the opening reception of “YANG Jiechang: Beneath the Golden Antlers” and “All Together Now: Celebrating AAPI Voices in Contemporary Art” yesterday! We hope you enjoyed the tour by artists Xiaoze Xie, Michael Arcega, Younhee Paik, and TT Takemoto !⁠
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Current exhibitions are on view until June 28, 2024.⁠
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We had a wonderful visit from the Stanford University Women’s Club at our gallery yesterday! A huge shoutout to our gallery director for the successful tour! Hoping everyone inspired and fulfilled.

Our current exhibitions are on view until March 26, 2024.

Gourmet artist Panpan Gao will launch the third culinary art tasting event at the gallery this Saturday (February 24th), from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM!

This time, Panpan Gao will present her edible art piece “Homage to Abstract” in the space of Xu Hongming’s solo exhibition (main gallery). This is the third edible immersive art installation experience following the previous piece “Primeval Chaos.”

Everyone is welcome to sign up and participate. For ticket purchases, click the eventbrite link below or scan the QR code on the poster!

🔗https://homage-to-abstract.eventbrite.com

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the opening reception of “The Form of the Formless” and “Homescapes” yesterday! We hope you enjoyed the tour by artist Tommy Fitzpatrick and the cello performance by cellist Kevin Yu!

“The Form of the Formless”and “Homescapes” are on view until March 26, 2024.

Thank you for featuring our second show “Lasting Impressions: Works on Paper” at our gallery current location, 229 Hamilton Ave.

🔗 To read the full article, click the link in our bio.

This show will open until Feb 13.

Our gallery will welcome composers and musicians Theo Robinson & Victor Xie for a special musical performance on Saturday, December 30.
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Robinson and Xie use improvisation as a tool to explore the deep subconscious. They will present a musical program of shattered, terse movements, with themes influenced by core concepts of each artist—for Robinson, familial bonds and enduring memories, and for Xie, the juxtaposition of momentary impressions and meditative calligraphy. 
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Close friends and long-time collaborators, their performance will include original compositions that meld the influences of jazz, Asian ritual music and the avant-garde, to create a uniquely uplifting and contemplative space as we welcome the New Year. 
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We hope you will join us for this final gallery event of 2023! 

Light refreshments and drinks will be served.

RSVP to [email protected]

Qualia Contemporary Art will be closed for the holidays from December 24th to December 27th. The Gallery will resume normal business hours starting December 28th, 2023.

We wish everyone a happy holiday! 🎄🥳🎁

Image: PAN Hsinhua, Flowers - 1 (part), 2020, Ink and color on paper (mineral rock), 49.5 x 18 in

Skudera’s mixed media pieces utilize materials and processes historically associated with women’s work like weaving and sewing. She embeds colored threads, hand-dyed and hand-spun mohair, remnants of salvaged clothing and fabric, buttons, and beads into the woven surfaces. In several of her pieces like Love in the Mist, Lady Slippers, Snow Drop, Maidenhair, and more, the repeating white lines throughout the image are the actual warp of the loom. She also paints the surfaces of many of her works with alternating gloss and matte media to give them shine, texture, and depth. ⁠

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P1⁠
Gail Skudera⁠
Love in the Mist, 2015⁠
Woven mixed media⁠
35 x 24 in, on 30 x 40 in stretched canvas⁠
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P2⁠
Gail Skudera⁠
Lady Slippers, 2015⁠
Woven mixed media⁠
35 x 24 in, on 30 x 40 in stretched canvas⁠
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P3⁠
Gail Skudera⁠
Snow Drop, 2015⁠
Woven mixed media⁠
35 x 24 in, on 30 x 40 in stretched canvas⁠

P4⁠
Gail Skudera⁠
Maidenhair, 2015⁠
Woven mixed media⁠
35 x 24 in, on 30 x 40 in stretched canvas⁠
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DM or email [email protected] for inquiries.⁠
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The Edge of Days⁠
November 7 - December 12, 2023⁠
Gallery Address: 229 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301⁠
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Please join us in the gallery new space Saturday November 11th at 4:30 PM for the opening reception of "The Edge of Days”by artists Chu Chu and Gail Skudera!

Come check out the beautiful new works at new location and meet with Gail in the gallery!

📍Gallery address: 229 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301

🅿️Parking Lot recommendation: 250 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301

Qualia is excited to announce our upcoming two-person exhibition "The Edge of Days” by women artists Chu Chu and Gail Skudera at our new location 229 Hamilton Ave in Palo Alto, , formerly occupied by Pace Gallery.

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This shows will open for viewing in the gallery Tomorrow November 7 to December 12 with an opening reception on Saturday November 11th from 4:30 - 6:30 PM.⁠

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Both artists reimagine and recontextualize the medium of photography to explore themes of memory, history, and elements of their own lives. Chu combines natural imagery with calligraphic ink painting to create abstract, multimedia works that depict objects and places that have personal significance to the artist. Skudera’s unique process involves deconstructing photographs and then manually weaving them back together with fibers on the loom, creating beautifully textured, tactile patterns, with a collage effect.

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⁠Image 1: Chu Chu, "Magnolia-Colour (白蘭花-彩)", 2011-2017. Photography, Chinese ink and calligraphy on paper, 45.28 x 59.06 in.
Image 2: Gail Skudera, “Passageway 3, 2020. Woven mixed media. 15 x 24.5 in.

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Qualia is excited to announce our upcoming two-person exhibition "The Edge of Days” by women artists Chu Chu and Gail Skudera at our new location 229 Hamilton Ave in Palo Alto, , formerly occupied by Pace Gallery.

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This shows will open for viewing in the gallery Tomorrow November 7 to December 12 with an opening reception on Saturday November 11th from 4:30 - 6:30 PM.⁠

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Both artists reimagine and recontextualize the medium of photography to explore themes of memory, history, and elements of their own lives. Chu combines natural imagery with calligraphic ink painting to create abstract, multimedia works that depict objects and places that have personal significance to the artist. Skudera’s unique process involves deconstructing photographs and then manually weaving them back together with fibers on the loom, creating beautifully textured, tactile patterns, with a collage effect.

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Image 1: Chu Chu, "Magnolia-Colour (白蘭花-彩)", 2011-2017. Photography, Chinese ink and calligraphy on paper, 45.28 x 59.06 in.
Image 2: Gail Skudera, “Passageway 3, 2020. Woven mixed media. 15 x 24.5 in.

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Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to announce our relocation to a new space at 229 Hamilton Ave, three short blocks from our current location on University Ave in downtown Palo Alto!

The new building, which was previously occupied by Pace Gallery, expands Qualia Contemporary Art’s exhibition area by 700 sq ft., offering more space and a conducive layout for displaying works of all sizes and mediums, and enabling the gallery’s steadily growing program of contemporary art. The new location will be open to the public on November 11, 2023, corresponding with the gallery’s third anniversary, and the opening of the exhibition Chu Chu + Gail Skudera: The Edge of Days, a two-woman exhibition that highlights the gallery's commitment to presenting innovative work from both Bay Area and internationally-based artists.

Qualia Contemporary Art supports and showcases work by established and emerging artists working in a variety of media — including painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as experimental practices with mixed media and technology. Since opening in Fall 2020, the gallery has mounted over 20 exhibitions, executing a range of ambitious installations and holding space for unconventional curatorial concepts.

We sincerely welcome you to celebrate this new chapter with us on Saturday, November 11, 2023, from 4:30-6:30 PM.

Green often works on six or seven pieces at a time, letting them inform each other. In his Star Drawings, Green explores the multiple suns in several compositions, building on previous lines and intuitively adding color, as in all his artworks.

Green’s practice is his way to make sense of the world, to measure, study, and quantify vast astronomical concepts. Nocturne (Euclidean) Core Sample/ Portal is one of Green’s grid works on a circular panel, a painting that hopes to make a physical object describe empty space.

For over a decade, WEN Zhongyan lived in the old city of Beijing, Hou Hai, witnessing its disappearances and rapid transformations. His works depict scenes of old Beijing at night, partially obscured with dense layers of screen printed circuit boards and a historical Beijing map circa 1950. The historical past and modern industry collide in these nostalgic images, and while WEN seeks to recollect the past he cannot fully return to it. The works evidence the passage of time, alteration of space, and the ongoing dialogue between modern industrial civilization and historical culture. His “New Beijing Image” is a testament to the changes Beijing has undergone, an ode to its past, collective cultural memory, and acceptance of change.

Qualia is excited to announce our two current exhibitions "Wandering in the City, Waking from a Dream" by WEN Zhongyan and "Three Directions" by Nathan Randall Green are extended until Saturday October 28th!

If you haven't already, please stop by to check out these gorgeous shows.

Writer Dave Roth from Square Cylinder covered our current exhibitions "Three Directions" by Nathan Randall Green and "Wandering in the City, Waking from a Dream" by WEN Zhongyan. Roth examines the unique and concentrated energy of Green's artworks and the beauty and haunting nature of WEN's images.⁠
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Roth comments "what springs more readily to mind when looking at Green’s current show, Three Directions, is the collective output of the New Mexico-based Transcendental Painters Group (1938-1941), a group of mystics who drew from the writings of Wassily Kandinsky and the ideas found in Constructivism, Buddhism, Orphism, Precisionism and Futurism. While Green appears to share their faith in the power of geometric forms to evoke transcendent feelings, his paintings, on close inspection, differ in virtually every important aspect: composition, surface treatment, paint handling, color and support structures."⁠
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To read the entire article, click here: https://www.squarecylinder.com/2023/10/nathan-randall-green-wen-zhongyang-qualia/?mc_cid=3bd1da0662

The artist has long been building his own painting surfaces that he shapes into amorphous, organic forms. He applies a mixture of paper pulp and gesso to the canvas to create an irregular, textured surface onto which he applies flat, graphic diagrammatical imagery. The work builds on his past practice, which has been slowly evolving over 15 years. His paintings are an idiosyncratic act of measuring, mapping, and making sense of our universe and its immensity. In creating the work, Green hopes to imbue in others the same awestruck delight of contemplating the vastness of the world which we inhabit.

WEN Zhongyan: 游观 (Wandering in the City, Waking from a Dream) introduces the artist’s poignant work to the Silicon Valley community, a place with deep ties to the complicated narrative of technological advancement and change explored in the exhibition. History, as recorded in the built environment, and experienced in the fabric of urban life, is equally central to WEN’s body of work. Audiences are invited to connect with WEN’s unconventional scrapbook of Beijing and to consider the dense networks that underlie their own perceptions of place.

Qualia is excited to be a part of Palo Alto Public Art Program's third interactive media art festival, Code:ART, a three-evening event on October 12-14, 2023, 5-10 p.m., which will re-imagine Palo Alto’s underutilized plazas, alleys, and public spaces through interactive light, sound, and motion. ⁠
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The festival will feature the major interactive temporary media artwork Curious Orchard by California artist Nate Mohler. The artwork will have sensors responding to visitor inputs activating the installation and will anchor the festival on King Plaza. Six urban intervention installations by Bay Area and international artists will be installed in downtown Palo Alto, reimagining downtown spaces, and exploring potential new uses of some of the sites. These artworks will include dynamic projections, immersive installations, responsive sound, light, and game-based experiences. The artists include Pneuhaus, Jeffrey Yip, Steven Wallace, Ruokan He, Cory Barr, Tong Wu, and Yuguang Zhang. Public Art Staff and Commissioners will conduct two public tours of all intervention sites each evening at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.⁠
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In the gallery on Friday, October 13, at 7.30 p.m. local artist Clive McCarthy will demonstrate and speak to how he utilizes small, custom-built computer systems to produce painting-like images rendered on flat screens.

Green’s Three Directions embraces symbolism to consider the scale and length of the universe, beginning with the Big Bang. Green uses radial forms that stand in for the sun — and the trillions of other stars like it. His process is intuitive; he naturally gravitates towards a fixed set of shapes or characters, including solar symbols, crescent shapes, and sunburst patterns, and rearranges them to create alternative views of our universe. Informed by a background in printmaking, particularly woodblock and serigraphy, Green paints in layers. His work often mimics geologic strata and the layers of Earth beneath our feet and frequently attempts to depict the passage of time within the single frame of his painting.

Congratulations to our artist XU Hongming on his exhibition at the Yuan Art Museum!

XU Hongming, from previous exhibition "Illusive Fields" is exhibiting "Everything is but a Floating Cloud" at the Yuan Art Museum in Beijing from Sept 15 - October 25th.

Circuit boards—symbols of modern industry—are repeatedly present in all of the selected works. WEN uses the circuit board diagram from the manual of his first TV as the source for this pattern, as well as a historical map of Beijing from 1950, before parts of the old city and the city walls were torn down. After constant layering, the intersecting grids create a psychedelic interference, weaving a colorful web-like network that visibly obscures the cityscape beneath while aesthetically and symbolically elucidating its details. Themes of uncertainty permeate WEN’s visions of Beijing. The dialogue between the layers is described by the artist as a conversation in which each is “perhaps speaking its own language, perhaps speaking in unison, perhaps a cacophony of noises, or perhaps a beautiful harmony,” but above all, “This conversation is of uncertainty.”