Grace Chang and Amos Kang: Scenic Route

LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to present Scenic Route, a duo exhibition featuring new works by Brooklyn-based artists Grace Chang and Amos Kang. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition explores the theatrical nature of storytelling, the instability of representation, and the evolving relationships between humanity, nature, and cultural identity. Drawing upon personal symbolism, popular mythology, and the material language of consumer culture, both artists construct imaginative worlds in which familiar objects acquire unexpected agency and meaning.

The title Scenic Route suggests a journey that privileges experience over efficiency, embracing the unfamiliar, the circuitous, and the seemingly incidental. A scenic route may be deliberately chosen or recognized only in retrospect, when an unintended deviation reveals its own unexpected value. “Scenic” refers to a picturesque view, but it also describes what belongs to the stage. The exhibition takes up this second meaning, approaching narrative as a kind of performance whose meaning is built as it goes and remains open to interruption and revision.

At the heart of Scenic Route lies an alternative understanding of humanity's relationship with nature. Scenic Route proposes a different understanding of how people relate to the natural world. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno took up Max Weber's idea of the “disenchantment” of the world to argue that Enlightenment reason came to know nature by classifying and calculating it, and in doing so made it available for control. Rather than treating nature as passive scenery, Scenic Route proposes a more reciprocal and enchanted relationship between human experience and the material world. Throughout the exhibition, natural forms and manufactured objects take an active part in how memory is held and how stories of place and belonging are told.

Grace Chang constructs enigmatic pictorial environments that resemble theatrical sets, where figures, objects, and natural forms occupy shifting positions within carefully staged compositions. Drawing from interpersonal relationships, emotional tensions, and personal symbolism, Chang transforms familiar gestures and materials into scenes that feel simultaneously intimate and estranged. Through flattening, distortion, and the manipulation of visual hierarchies, she challenges conventional distinctions between foreground and background, protagonist and supporting character.

Each painting reads like a still from an imagined performance, where figures and objects assume interchangeable roles and familiar forms are transformed into theatrical props. In Burnt Tongue (2025), figures resembling taste buds hide from shadow-puppet dogs beneath a wrinkled, plastic-like sky, while a flowering stem simultaneously wilts, buds, and blooms. In Ants in Passing (2026), trees merge with the architecture of an anthill, evoking questions of communication, responsibility, and the possibility of connection across unseen boundaries. These seemingly surreal encounters emerge from Chang's interest in the emotional complexity of lived experience, allowing interpersonal relationships to unfold through a language of visual metaphor rather than direct representation.

Often beginning with a gesture drawn from nature, Chang develops compositions through intuitive processes of association and displacement. Her paintings invite a phenomenological encounter in which feelings and memories are communicated through sensory associations rather than explicit narratives. Within these theatrical environments, nature functions not simply as a symbolic reference or backdrop to human activity, but as an active medium through which lived experiences are registered and transformed. This approach evokes an idea of "enchanted nature," allowing the material world to carry emotional resonance without being subordinated to the human subject. Meaning emerges gradually through sustained observation, rewarding viewers who follow the paintings' elusive internal logic.

Amos Kang approaches storytelling through speculative objects and installations that draw upon East Asian visual culture, American mythology, and the aesthetics of cuteness. His anthropomorphic sculptures, often fabricated through synthetic materials and processes that imitate wood, gold, and other familiar surfaces, become performers within narratives shaped by cultural consumption, reproduction, and representation.

Kang's practice explores the critical possibilities of posthumanism within consumer culture, examining how industrial production and cultural imagery transform natural forms into commodities, characters, and objects of desire. His sculptures complicate distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the human and the nonhuman. Their anthropomorphic qualities suggest bodies that have been culturally constructed, reproduced, and circulated, particularly through stereotyped representations of Asian identity.

For Scenic Route, Kang develops a new body of work informed by the fables of Parson Weems and their subsequent representations in American popular culture. In Parson Weem's Fable (Your Lie in April) (2026), Kang reimagines the familiar story of George Washington and the cherry tree through a collision of American folklore, Disney's Pinocchio, and Japanese anime. By grafting Pinocchio's face onto the cherry tree and introducing imagery associated with Your Lie in April, Kang transforms a foundational American myth into a hybrid narrative that questions what national histories choose to remember, embellish, or omit.

The work's synthetic materiality further complicates its narrative. Kang employs resin and digitally fabricated faux wood to mimic natural surfaces, while gold leaf introduces associations of sacredness and cultural value. Drawing upon Homi Bhabha's concept of postcolonial mimicry, Kang considers imitation as both a strategy of assimilation and a potential form of subversion. His sculptures inhabit the space between mimicry and mockery, using humor, cuteness, and deliberate artifice to unsettle the authority of familiar cultural symbols. In works such as Cherry Blossom Eyes (2026), botanical forms acquire anthropomorphic features, suggesting how natural and cultural modes of mimicry can overlap in the construction of racialized identities.

Although their practices differ in medium and visual language, Chang and Kang share an interest in the constructed nature of experience. Both artists treat representation as a form of staging, where objects become actors, familiar symbols assume unfamiliar roles, and narratives unfold through selective acts of inclusion and omission. In Chang's paintings, natural forms become vessels of memory and sensation; in Kang's sculptures, manufactured objects assume anthropomorphic identities that complicate conventional distinctions between people and things. Their practices invite viewers to reconsider how meaning is assigned, performed, and continually renegotiated.

Scenic Route ultimately proposes that the value of a journey may lie precisely in its diversions. In a culture increasingly oriented toward immediacy, productivity, and resolution, the exhibition offers an alternative rhythm—one that embraces uncertainty, sustained attention, and the imaginative possibilities of taking the longer way around. Through these encounters, viewers are invited to reconsider not only how stories are told, but also how humanity understands its place within a world of interconnected beings, objects, and environments.