Asian Art’s New War Is Psychological, Its Weapon Melancholia - BANK 2025
BY SERENA HANZHI WANG Aug 12th, 2025
What makes a curator want to stage a fourteen-person show? Ego? Abundance? Maybe just the rare chance to say "yes" to everyone. But let's be honest: sometimes scale is strategy. To Save and to Destroy, curated by Qingyuan Deng and staged inside an actual former bank - an architectural flex that syncs perfectly with BANK's own name - isn't just big for the sake of spectacle. It's big because it has something to show. Or perhaps, something to show off.
Sorry if that sounds business-y with Arts, but let's not pretend scale is neutral. In an art economy where legacy collectors are signing out and younger collectors are more into Hedi Slimane Dior Homme than actual paintings... A sprawling, fifteen-person showcase has its own logic: it's trying to multiply possibilities. It spreads risk. It says look how much there is - and also look how much we have. It dares us to make sense of Art, now - what it even means anymore.
What's hot right now? What are young artists in Asia making right now, and what does it mean to show those works here, in downtown Manhattan? In that light, the show becomes less like a group exhibition and more like a dispatch - a pulse-check on a parallel art world. It's not a thesis show, it's a moodboard.
And yet - it's all so beautiful. Every work in To Save and to Destroy is flawlessly executed, tightly edited, visually seductive. Nothing feels clumsy or half-baked. Even the more fragmented or ambiguous pieces are elegantly ambiguous. The materials are rich, the lighting hits just right, and the crowd at the opening confirmed it: this is what people want to see. But is that a good thing?
Humanity's tension here - between posh and risk, between the market's appetite and the messier demands of history. Some of the artists in this show had parents who made much bolder work. Think of Tehching Hsieh, who punched a clock every single hour for an entire year-the living embodiment of time's exhaustion and burden. Asian and diaspora Artists in the 1980s and '90s - working under actual political danger, improvising in hotel rooms, using spit and blood and performance as protest. They didn't ask if the work was too strange, or too difficult to sell. They asked if it was urgent.
In light of that, does historical weight really require historical risk? Can melancholia be radical, or has it become aestheticized into safe reflection? These questions sit at the heart of To Save and to Destroy and echo beyond its walls.
Cato Ouyang gives me a small, quiet "maybe not." Three works, small enough to miss if you weren't paying attention: Backstory, Procession Figure Study, and Untitled, they are modest in scale but materially dense: dyed textiles, papier-mâché, oil on fabric, all rendered in muted, flesh-adjacent tones. They feel like archaeological fragments of bodies or rituals we no longer speak - devotional without dogma, incomplete yet deliberate. Their scale asks you to lean in, to surrender to their silence.
At the center, Adriana Furlong's answer is different: once this is over, I'll have more time for you (2024) - a grid-like concrete relief that feels both fossilized and digital, like the emotional residue of a thousand-year-delayed message, finally carved into stone. Weight here is survival - it's already outlasted the danger.
Diane Severin Nguyen's An Era Where War Became a Memory (2018) centers on a peeled lychee, delicately staged cut-out toe-nails in the surrounding. The image is seductively movie-lit, almost commercially glossy - until the violence sinks in. The fruit, fleshy and bright, reads as bodily, wounded, eroticized. There are no soldiers, no explicit battle scenes - only an eerie stillness, and fragments of something (habits, perhaps) that hint at violence made abstract by time. It's as if trauma has been transmuted into an enigmatic tableau, a secret embedded in plain sight, waiting for someone who knows the tropical ways.
Ren Light Pan shows up more than once-not just because her work sells, or her identity background: she threads together Eastern and Western art-historical lineages in a way that feels alive, not too academic. She's had a seven-year hiatus (fell into depression after film school in 2012, transitioned in 2016, stopped painting, and only resumed in 2022) and rose back into visibility through ink as both solace and structure. Her pieces shimmer between recognition and erasure-like something half-remembered, and slightly wrong. Cat in the Water floats a ghosted face in fog, symmetrical enough to feel off. Reclining Nude teases a body, then dissolves into smoke, blush, ash. It's erotic and not at the same time. If weight depends on clarity, Pan's work quietly tells you that's your mistake.
Edie Xu stays in the material world. Sound of Kline is a sculptural form slump - cratered, cavity-ridden, hive-like in their delicacy and unease. The thing in person looks like a bunker-state interior cuz you can go in deep. Mounted above, DS Stone's five chiseled fragments, with raw contours and sedimentary heft, pull the wall into a different temporality. Less a mask than a ruin, the work feels excavated from a ritual older than language. Where Pan's surfaces tremble with impermanence, Xu's stone settles into stillness - a counterpulse of solidity in a room otherwise flickering at the edges.
Upstairs, Andrew Luk takes that mass and coats it in gold. Skullfluid embeds saints, targets, orbital diagrams under lacquer and gel, then scratches at the surface like he's testing how much can be taken off before the image collapses. It's not risk as rupture - it's risk as maintenance. Preservation as editing. Editing as… maybe its own kind of danger?
Leon Zhan's pair of oils slows that logic even further. One shows bare winter forest; the other holds a group of brown wood collections. They aren't allegories so much as conditions-pauses in time that ask what it means to look at landscape painting now, when the genre carries the sediment of Romanticism, nationalism, and environmental anxiety. Zhang doesn't re-enact those histories, but neither does he strip them away; he keeps them humming in the background, letting the viewer decide whether the act of painting trees in 2025 is a preservation, a revival, or a quiet protest.
Amiko Li takes patience and makes it domestic: a blue hallway dotted with stars, a book caught mid-turn, a body curled under a SECURITY cap. They're small moments, so unimportant they almost fall through your fingers - but they hold.
Other works build on this interplay of clarity and opacity. Justine Neuberger's Hieratic Drift (2025) opens with déjà vu: a lone figure - barefoot, PJs rolled up - sprawled in the foreground, as if they've just slipped into (or out of) a dream. I hate sleep paralysis too. Behind them looms a ghost girl group from another dimension - six masked specters with glinting eyes, cotton-candy wigs, and faces so blurred they barely hold together. Are they welcoming you? Possessing you? Or just trying to enjoy their own timeline?
"To save?" I'm bad at saving. I always keep one leg out the door-just in case.
"To destroy?" I'm softer now. The older I get, the less I believe in burning things down.
Maybe the engine behind both is… love-the compulsion to keep or to end because we want meaning. Freud would file it under libido turned inward; self-deconstruction, Fight Club quote is ringing: "Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives." We all inherit a hand-me-down manual for feeling from our parents-partial, smudged-and spend adulthood annotating it. So we train our nervous systems to deconstruct, to chase the almost-not escape, exactly, but a survival circuit looking for closure in a world that withholds it.
So: does historical weight require historical risk in Arts? Not in the old sense. The battleground moved-from bodies and streets to attention, legibility, self-surveillance. The works here carry weight by other means: by leaving gaps you have to cross (with your own risk), by sealing and scratching surfaces until care becomes its own archaeology, by pacing time so patiently that drama looks shallow next to endurance. Our parents' generation had visible danger; ours is within. Different arena, same gravity.
Weight, then, isn't the climax of risk-it's the structure that lets a thing keep being carried after the sirens stop. That's what this show models: not a wound to close, but a way to live inside it. I thought of Joseph Beuys-and maybe he did see this coming. He built a whole career around a half-invented wartime rescue, wrapping himself in felt and fat to transform trauma into myth.
