For Gallery Platform LA, Bel Ami presents a two-person exhibition by Milano Chow and Soshiro Matsubara. Though Chow and Matsubara are driven by their own motives, both artists engage the visual language of perceived architectures and framed narratives to elicit latent fears and fantasies. Drawing upon a wide range of historical material, from books on interior design to salacious biographies, the two artists conjure a topography of concealment and investigation, love and longing, accentuating the boundaries between intimacy and exclusion.

In their respective practices, Chow and Matsubara reify and challenge the idea of woman-as-mystery. The women that populate their works are incorporated fixtures of the built world, whether they seem to fit in or not. In Milano Chow’s drawings with graphite, photo transfer and collage on paper, solitary female figures punctuate enigmatic architectural facades. Donned in somewhat androgynous garb, they appear simultaneously emotive and indifferent, reflections of the buildings they occupy. Whereas Chow depicts a voyeuristic surveillance of urban exteriors, Soshiro Matsubara coyly invites us to peek at fetishistic obsessions that most often take place behind closed doors. Matsubara’s Last Night, a series of ceramic wall lamps upheld by entwined figures, resembling Medusas with phallic and snake-like arms, entice and warn of what may be discovered beyond the shadows. Female faces rendered as masks are ensconced in the walls, witness to ghostly hallway flirtations.

Heteronormative ideologies haunt the city, scripting how we move through space and form relationships, but Chow and Matsubara hint that in romancing these cold structures they may willingly bend.

“Enigmas and secrets generate the image of closed hidden spaces which generate in turn the divided topography of inside and outside. …this phantasmagoric topography has haunted representations of femininity across the ages, not consistently manifest, but persisting as an intermittent strand of patriarchal mythology and misogyny. It is an image of female beauty as artifact or mask, as an exterior, alluring, and seductive surface that conceals an interior space containing deception and danger.”

– Laura Mulvey, Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity, 1992

Milano Chow (b. 1987, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Barnard College in 2009 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. She has held solo exhibitions at Adams and Ollman, Portland; Chapter NY, New York; Galleria Acappella, Naples; and Mary Mary, Glasgow. Recent group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Props assist the House, Bel Ami, Los Angeles; For Mario at Tina Kim Gallery, New York; The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, and New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain; A Slice Through the World at Drawing Room London & Modern Art Oxford, Oxford. She is a 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

Soshiro Matsubara (b. 1980, Hokkaido, Japan) lives and works in Vienna. He has held solo exhibitions at Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Schiefe Zähne, Berlin; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Brennan & Griffin, New York; and XYZ collective, Tokyo. Selected group exhibitions include Museum for Preventive Imagination, MACRO Museum, Rome (forthcoming); Working Hours, Auto Italia, London (forthcoming); You are in my Veins, Kvindemuseets, Aarhus; FORM AND VOLUME, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon; Happy Mind Natural High, Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; Kiss in Tears, Friedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles; there’s hell in hello but more in goodbye, Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw; By the lakeside: organized by Yui Yaegashi, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; and PLUGGS, Karma International, Zürich. He is co-director of XYZ collective, Toyko. In 2017 Matsubara founded the antique shop Haus der Matsubara.