How would you describe the colour of hope? Can you imagine a colour that doesn’t exist? If you were to choose a colour that represents your childhood, what would it be? If you add the hue of the weather outside, what would it be?

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We are delighted to announce the launch our first exhibition of the spring season following the Lunar New Year: ‘Soft Gloss’ by British artist Emma Stone-Johnson (b.1982). The Asia Art Center has long been engaged in postwar Asian modern art movements, encompassing the ‘Fifth Moon Art Society（五月畫會 )’ and ‘Ton Fan Art Society（東方畫會 )’ in Taiwan since the late 1950s, Japan’s Mono-ha（もの派 ) and Gutai（具体） movements, as well as Southeast Asia’s Nanyang School in Singapore and the Bandung School in Indonesia. Within the vast realm of abstract art, how should we understand the abstract paintings of the emerging artist Emma Stone-Johnson?

Starting from the 1950s, the trend of Abstract Expressionism has swept the world, a history of over seventy years. One of the major differences between Emma Stone-Johnson’s works and early abstract paintings is the extensive use of fluorescent pigments and metallic luster materials. Since the rapid development of chemical technology after World War II, artists have no longer been limited to colour found solely in nature or within the traditional colour wheel. The title of this exhibition, ‘Soft Gloss’, is a title of a type of paint itself, glimpsed in an aisles of a hardware shop. The materiality of paint and pigment, an ever important and intrinsic part of the artist’s practice. Stone-Johnson saturates the canvas with water, allowing the image to emerge through the chemical changes of pigments, binders, diluted acrylics, ink, metals, and other substances as the water-saturated canvas absorbs the fluidity of the paint. Just as we absorb light into our skin. The image seemingly swims to the surface as it dries, just as memory, loss and grief float to the surface of our consciousness throughout our days. They swim in and out.

Only through light do we perceive colour. The artist is fascinated by the unexpected changes in sunlight, shadows, memories, our shadow self and the unexpected outcome and flow of pigments. Her inspiration comes from her daily observation, as our mind is inundated with images, clear and blurred. In her mind, there is a rapidly spinning colour wheel filled with colours she encounters, which she weaves, deconstructs, and re-encodes into the vibrant world on the canvas. By making paintings,  Stone-Johnson makes artistic inquiries: “What would it be like to walk through a museum of melted paintings?”  She views her studio as a spiritual gym, the act of painting is an act of colour coding. In her studio, there seems to exist an archaeological forensic investigation into the artist’s own psyche. A cathartic act, a fight for light in darkness.
She delves into the study of colour and pigments. She constructs new brushes and develops new approaches of painting and modes of expression. In her works, pigments seem to drip and crack from the canvas, permeating from the gallery floor, which resembles a distorted ocean, and the traces in the painting are like blurry symbols, forming gullies, pools and worlds. Stone-Johnson as an artist writer shows her incisive analysis of colour in her poem ‘Thoughts on the Colour Orange’, written in 2023, that sheds light on overlooked aspects of colour:

‘Orange is unquieting, yellow + red. / Suppose I were to begin by saying I have fallen into a rage with the colour orange. / It’s shouty and steeped in 70’s porn film connotations, maybe a peachy-orange, pink-tipped Delphinium is just passable / but ‘sweet sunset’ orange Gerbera’s can go to hell. Orange shouts estate agent, travel agent. It shouts the boring bits of masculinity, it’s as anticlimactic as an easy jet flight. But pearlescent orange is nostalgic in a kind of wonderful way. Christmas tree green talking to pale turquoise is a conversation I never want to leave then pale turquoise talking to nickel azo gold is a rave / without the need for e’s / oh, I said I didn’t like orange. it’s about the shades though. Like the shades of a person, levels of shade with their nuances – some nice, some not.’

Inspired by artists that were active in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011, USA), Katharina Grosse (1961-, Germany), Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884, UK), Lynda Benglis (1941-, USA), Phylida Barlow (1944-2023, UK), and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944, Sweden), Stone-Johnson shares their pursuit of freedom, as well as the insights of their disregard for boundaries, hierarchical structure, and their looseness, their interrogations, so as to accomplishes her profound study of the spectrum of colour.

About the artist

Emma Stone-Johnson (b. 1982, Brighton, UK) lives and works between Hove, (England) and London. Emma Stone-Johnson is a British born artist who received her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2022 and her BA at Chelsea College of Art in 2004. Selected exhibitions include solo exhibitions Flexed Sky and Glittered Earth with Makasiini Contemporary (Turku, 2023), group shows On the Voyage with Asia Art Center (Beijing, 2023), Beyond Boundaries with Gus Galleries (London, 2022), Away with VinVin (Vienna, 2023), Buffer with Guts Galleries (London, 2022), Chicago Expo (Chicago, 2022) and residency programme at The Fores Project (London, 2023).