Shades of Sasha Gordon

Normally, I don’t like superficial hyper-realism; For me, it’s a visual dead end. But 27-year-old David Zwirner’s new cycle of portraits by Sasha Gordon, titled “Mist,” is an exception. The star of the show is a seven-foot-tall painting called… pruningin which Gordon is trapped in a Houdini-like water tank, forced out by an unidentified female. (Dualities abound in Gordon’s work—could she also be the faceless executioner?) Bubbles of air emerge from her mouth as she presses her knees against the sink glass until it cracks. The tank’s rusting iron frame doubles as a symbol: the constraints of gender and race that imprison it.

This is not identity politics made for the market, nor is it more virtue signaling. These plates are too weird and slippery for that. The lighting is theatrical, the colors are bright, and the bodies are lively. Eroticism is undeniable, it is never safe or expendable. Gordon uses sex as a weapon, turning it upside down to confuse him.

“I had a difficult relationship with my Asian identity,” Gordon, who was born to a Polish-American father and a Korean immigrant mother, admitted, adding that she often felt “disconnected from myself.” She grew up as a queer Jewish Korean American in Westchester County, creating a divide in which she became fascinated and rendered invisible. In “Mist,” Gordon uses her body to present a story about how identity is written and distorted—often by herself. Gordon plays all the roles – victim and villain, stabbed and stabbed – and reveals how Asian women have internalized contradictory ideals: docile yet hypersexual.

It leans heavily into horror and survival cinematic tropes. in He was still far awayGordon embodies the “Final Girl” – the resourceful sole survivor of horror films and atomic fallout. Behind her, the mushroom cloud glows a radiant red-orange. But she seems completely oblivious, clipping her toenails with her headphones on.

in Agriculture paradisethe protagonist is force-fed by an antagonist with waxy, wrinkled skin. Here, beauty literally becomes violence when her mouth is opened, and food becomes punishment. Women are trained to be quiet dolls, then punished when they stumble. Gordon pushes these ideas to the extreme, revealing the violence buried within.

Whores in the attic Gordon gives us peeps at three towering Asian succubi looking down on her. visit It amounts to a double self-portrait, in which a semi-naked Gordon is pushed helplessly into a chair by a great naked ghost. in breeding, The force feeding escalated with Gordon being overcome by three giant Asian shadows. in fossil, A battle to the death unfolds on a barren wasteland. Gordon is bound by a leash of pubic hair extending from her vagina and is being dragged by one of her demonic identities. (Gordon has a passion for rough hair and nail clippings.)

Not every fabric tumbles. Horror conceits sometimes turn into B-movie costume dramas with antagonists who seem more imitation than myth. Yet when it hits, it hits hard. She paints to free herself from fetishism and stifling beauty standards. It risks melodrama because melodrama is the original language of horror. More is better than less. It is better to shout than to whisper.