Vague Domains explores thoughts and experiences related to the duality found in resemblance and Otherness. In the same sense, this project investigates relationships between me and the world, me and other people, and me and me. In everyday life, I recognize myself in a certain category of people, for instance, Asian, middle aged woman, first generation of immigrants, and newbie with a career gap or switch. Through the name of these classifications, I engage with a sensibility of wandering in vague domains, negotiating with ambiguity, anxiety, alienation, and ambivalence. This project embarked from personal, emotional, and social challenges dealing with boundaries of collisions among those names that define one person, resisting generalization and clarification.

Three female artists with Northeast Asian backgrounds, Julia Elise Hong, Fay Ku, Ohya Kanako, participate in this exhibition. It is hard to distinguish between Korean, Chinese (including Taiwanese), and Japanese from their appearances. These three countries in Northeast Asia are seemingly analogous by intertwined cultural, anthropological, historical transportation and influences from each other. However, each country has distinct cultural heritages and characteristics to some degree. Vague Domains discovers how the artists with the backgrounds of three neighboring countries react to the world’s perception, and how they articulate differences within resemblance.

In art history practices, the notion of Others has been translated to people with different associations of color, race, sex, nation, in which they are inherited. Three artists participating in Vague Domains illustrate their experiences and interpretations of Otherness in diverse forms, mediums, and techniques of art. Their methodologies to embody thoughts on Otherness are somehow psychoanalytic, such as an  application to uncanny or surrealistic engagement. Vague Domains unfolds as an exploration into the intricate complexities of relationships between diverse definitions that one person has through the artistic lens of three distinct female voices. Julia Elise Hong intertwines conflicting concepts in her paintings, portraying relationships between figures with awkward energy. Ohya Kanako, utilizing red and orange interspaces, captures the ambiguity and disquietude within seemingly ordinary elements. Fay Ku delves into the nuanced relationship between history and self, employing a contrast between antique backgrounds and modern figures. The artists examine the relationships between them and other people.

Moreover, Vague Domains interrogates why these artists experiment with diptych format. As an art term a diptych is an artwork consisting of two pieces or panels that together create a pair. The diptych was known as a form that originated from ancient Greek writing boards transcended to medieval Byzantine art and Netherlands secular paintings. In modern centuries, a diptych was utilized by Pop artists due to its trait generating duality which  may appear similar but possesses different connotations. Simultaneously, diptych calligraphy artworks that are analogous but distinct can be found easily throughout Asian art history. In this sense, the diptych artworks exhibited in Vague Domains portrait dual identities or ambivalent egos of the artists. Additionally, the form of diptych embraces double-bind ideas of contestation against each other. The diptych works in the show depict a pair of me, who are identical but differed, facing each other in a single frame. These artists also engage in a critical reflection on the myriad emotions and challenges within the collisions of personal and societal, subjective and objective, mundane and extraordinary, historical and personal realms. Through a diverse range of materials and techniques, they visually articulate the ambivalent and fragile states born from this introspective journey in their unique ways of diptych. Furthermore, the diptych method could be discussed in the expansion of AI generated images that copies original artworks in a similar but distinguished way, resembling a form of simulacra. To some degree, Vague Domains presents three artist’s practices of diptych as a prodromal symptoms for the uncertain world by an dominated AI dependent society.