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Sifang Art Museum is pleased to announce British artist William Monk’s solo exhibition Psychopomp, on view from April 26 through June 30, 2024. The exhibition showcases 16 works created by the artist since 2019. While presenting Monk’s exploration of pictorial language, the exhibition weaves cultural memories and life experiences behind these enigmatic paintings intertextually into the three-floor exhibition space of Sifang Art Museum.

The exhibition derives its title from the painting Underworld Psychopomp (the ferryman), a work in the ferryman series. The quasi-totemic figure originates from Monk’s attempt to imagine the unimaginable, namely death. Interested in how cultures describe death, the artist has imagined his own. Like the Charon, a guide of souls in Greek mythology, Monk uses painting as a “soul-guiding” ritual, in this way, he continuously captures forms of individual consciousness and soul in his image- generating process. Inspired by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot test and drawing on his childhood favorite film The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, he has created an alternative and highly personal shamanic “visual mantra”, his ferryman and guide.

William Monk is known for his enigmatic paintings that break down figuration. Viewers are drawn into a fictive realm by his works where the artist keeps realizing signals connecting imagery and “significance”, while repeating certain elements to subtly construct his own symbolic spectrum. However, he always halts at a moment when the viewer is poised to establish meaningful connections between the paintings and reality. I and II of the Smoke Ring Mountain series, exhibited in the first-floor main gallery, are bathed in an ambiguous light pink hue, while III and IV are overcast with a somber gradient crimson where danger looms. Their communicating through smoke signals, hard to transcribe in the fog. In the museum’s staircase space, Son (return) I and Nova (deadeye) III—circular paintings created between 2021 and 2022 —hover midair like a space tunnel caught in motion. The former exudes a sacred and ever-dispersing yellow that resonates with the religious undertones of its title.

Outside the energy-filled core, the canvas edges resemble synapses, plant tendrils, or organisms in perpetual fission, offering solace amidst the panic brought by mysticism. Meanwhile, the latter depicts a nova absorbing life energy. Pictorially speaking, the work evokes a limbo state, an imaginary blind spot (or flickering residues left on closed retinas), a promise for life emerging out of darkness. Within this promise, life thrives and endures through its metamorphosis into different forms.

Hung at the lowest level of the exhibition, its own underworld, circular forms re- emerge in The Ferryman II, with the figure of “ferryman” positioned within a mirror- image universe created by the color scheme of the Nova (deadeye) series. The background “darkness” comprises organic, fluid visual imagery formed by intricate colors, evoking the static noise of early-stage television images and variegated life experiences behind such imagery. Flesh-colored, lifelike semicircular edges jostle this to the extent that we can barely distinguish between brightness and darkness, growth and destruction, being and nothingness. Similarly, in Mount Atom higher up on the second floor, an ascending power ultimately transforms into clouds that cast a cold gaze upon the world. However, within the mountains or mounds of earth, signs of life manifest themselves as writhing organic matter. In the series of Son of Nowhere, the artist unfolds French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of “non-place”—an anthropological space where human relations and historical remains are erased. This series, displayed in the upper gallery designed by architect Steven Holl, also intends to mobilize specific areas beyond the artwork. It guides viewers to discard any predetermined logic and examine all beings, living and non-living, from a perspective that transcends the Anthropocene.

The show ends with Son (return) III looking up to the sky, across the horizon, and Nova (deadeye) I looking below to the whole museum and preceding works. The Ferryman (ship of fools) with its aviary-like form hangs with them reminding us that the guide of souls is always watching, a humanoid body with eyes gazing.

These totems, captured by Monk from personal experiences and the universal spiritual realm of humanity (and beyond), aim to interrogate the depth of human perception and imagination. Aligned with his intention of employing forms between figuration and non-figuration in series like Smoke Ring Mountain and Mount Atom, the “ferryman” does not refer to a specific figure but rather a force that leads the spirit to the other shore.

Through his manipulation of color, light, composition, and space, Monk distills the unfathomable aspects of human consciousness into an enigmatic, abstract visual sign system, drawing viewers into a world beyond mere existence (Dasein) while incessantly releasing energy to enhance their spiritual intensity. In the context of today’s chaotic world, William Monk, in his own way, reasserts the importance of spirituality in art, thereby inviting thoughts on the inexplicable relations between human, nature and the cosmos.

The exhibition is organized by Sifang Art Museum. Special thanks to the artist, Pace Gallery, touring exhibition partners Long Museum, Shanghai; He Art Museum, Guangdong; Nanjing Pukou Culture & Tourism Development Group, Jiangsu Sifang Cultural Group, collectors Jonathan Berkenstadt, Romain Bruere and all others who have helped and supported this exhibition.