Make Room’s new location in Hollywood is a private garden courtyard leading into two exhibition spaces. This space, on a balmy, LA-summer evening, infused with the ethereal charm of director Emilia Yin, leant an alluring hush on opening night and afforded the necessary intimacy to view its inaugural group show “Desire Encapsulated.”
The show steps in like a fresh dance partner with the eternal dance with desire. Whether desire means hunger, lust, admiration, longing, destruction, transcendence, is irrelevant; the artists featured are comfortable eschewing definitions in favor of holding onto hips, fun-house mirroring its ecstatic moves, and even if to encapsulate seems futile as any lover intuits the preemptive loss that is contained in desire’s dialectic—give me more of what I cannot hold onto-—this invites yet another swoon into jouissance and contemplation.

Works by Jouen Kim Aatchim and Yanyan Huan
Installation image of Desire Encapsulated. Photo by Julian Calero. Courtesy of Make Room Los Angeles

Some of the works echo the soft sighs of mono no aware—the Japanese phrase alluding to the gentle impermanence of things. Yifan Jiang’s painting Wheels, captures a single horse rolling on his back down a hill in the wispy stripes of oranges and purples during twilight, and Joeun Kim Aatchim’s The Piggy Back memorializes, in pigment on silk, a pair of ghostly loafers; Yuri Yuan’s deeply-affecting painting Untitled presents two women turned away from the viewer, one at a distance in the arid twilight background, one in the foreground; Yuan’s gentle brushstrokes suggest the woman observing is on verge of dissipation; from the left corner a wide hand reaches from below, disembodied, as if to reach toward is already to be pulled away, pulled apart.

Works by Lita Albuquerque
Installation image of Desire Encapsulated. Photo by Julian Calero. Courtesy of Make Room Los Angeles

“Desire Encapsulated” produces an overwhelming ebb and flow of varying emotions and experiences. Guided perhaps by the tidal force of Lita Albuquerque’s Untitled, a sublime, white gold-leaf moon that continued to pull me towards its maternal orb, at one moment considering the cosmos’ mystery, only to fall to my knees to admire Catalina Ouyang’s font VII, a floor installation made from egg yolk, soap stone, horse hair, the earth beneath my feet now oozing up volcanic gestation and sex.

If Gautama Buddha’s claim that desire is the root of all suffering is true, “Desire Encapsulated” reinforces an idea from Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, that suffering is also voluptuous.

Desire Encapsulated
Make Room
On view thru July 31st