Prologue: Freer than the wind by Yameng Lee Thorp
Yameng Lee Thorp - Meadow Mirage
Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. 72 x 102 inches. 2024.
Prologue: Freer than the wind
a solo exhibition by
Yameng Lee Thorp
Opening Reception
Saturday, November 2nd at 6pm
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA 94612
To receive a preview contact
info@part2gallery.com
pt.2 Gallery is honored to present Prologue: Freer than the wind, Yameng Lee Thorp’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. This exhibition features large-scale and intimate paintings alive with abstract movements and plant-like forms, evoking a sense of wildness and freedom. Constructed from the subconscious, this body of work invites viewers into a dreamlike world. Lee Thorp’s artistic process, marked by contradictions—raw yet refined, spontaneous yet deliberate—asks us to reflect on life’s cyclical nature, where resilience and fragility exist in harmony.
Lee Thorp explores themes of cultural memory and resilience, drawing from her personal history and a broader inquiry into belonging and survival. From her experience moving from China to South Africa as a child in the late 1980s, she navigates the complexities of identity in spaces where belonging often feels out of reach. These experiences shape her practice, where painting becomes a form of quiet resistance to the forces that seek to confine herself and others.
At the heart of this work is a deep sense of intergenerational healing and connection. Influenced by her grandmother’s traditional Chinese ink paintings, Lee Thorp’s practice channels the power of individual brushstrokes—using raw canvas to allow pigment to pool, echoing techniques passed down through her lineage. In the painting Hearts light, like balloons, which features a figure representing her daughter, Lee Thorp seeks to connect with her inner child while honoring her grandmother's legacy. This creates a conversation between generations, highlighting the significance of familial ties and shared experiences that transcend time and culture.
Yameng Lee Thorp
Hears light, like balloons
Flashe and oil on canvas
48 x 60 inches
2024
There is an underlying theme of rebuilding—of picking up the pieces and reconstructing something that was taken or erased, and weaving it into the fabric of a new reality. These paintings convey a sense of hopefulness in that process—acknowledging loss, yet refusing to be defined by it. The exhibition serves as a prologue to a deeper biographical exploration of her family’s painful history of migration and survival, drawing from oral accounts of their experiences in China during the Cultural Revolution. Lee Thorp channels a kind of internal landscape into her work, reflecting on the existential question of belonging. "What is belonging if you don’t even exist?" she asks, encapsulating the universal struggle to find one's place in the world.
After a hiatus from painting, Lee Thorp returned to her practice in 2018 with a renewed sense of urgency, prompted by the profound experience of motherhood. "Paint or die," she describes, articulating how becoming a mother sharpened her focus on life, mortality, and identity. This transformative experience reconnected her to her ancestors and the natural world, bringing spiritual depth to her work. Her color palette—particularly the use of celadon and jade greens—grounds her abstract compositions in both personal and cultural symbolism, while reaching toward something transcendent.
Prologue: Freer than the wind marks the start of what Lee Thorp views as an evolving journey. This exhibition presents a bold and sincere exploration of subconscious abstraction, family history, and resilience, while setting the foundation for future exhibitions that will further investigate themes of displacement, hybrid identity, ancestral dreams, and freedom.
Yameng Lee Thorp - Edges of another world
Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. 48 x 48 inches. 2024.
Grass, or just weeds
Yameng Lee Thorp
To exist
existing
existence
is bigger than belonging
for what is belonging
if there is no existence.
To exist, means I can be
wherever I want to be.
I can be free,
freer than the wind,
freer than the bird.
Without a nest to return to…
everywhere I can make a home,
and multiply
against the elements,
against luck,
against fate,
against the root of a tree,
against a rock,
against the blade.
To spawn again where I fall.
Yameng Lee Thorp, an Oakland-based artist, was born in China in the 1980s into a family of artists whose legacy was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Her grandfather, a celebrated artist, faced persecution, a trauma that reverberated across generations and ultimately led to her family’s emigration to post-Apartheid South Africa when she was 11. These profound shifts in geography and culture deeply influence her practice, where art becomes a form of defiance and reclamation. Yameng holds a BFA in Fine Art from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and an MA in Design from Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows at Compound Gallery, Cedar Street Gallery, and SOBU, as well as in group exhibitions at pt.2, Good Mother, and Soft Times. She is currently an Artist in Residence at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley.