Chronic Stillness
Wieteke Heldens & Alisa Yang
February 18 - March 31, 2022

Lydian Stater is excited to present Chronic Stillness: Wieteke Heldens & Alisa Yang, a two-person exhibition featuring new NFT works from both artists. Utilizing video and digital technologies, the works explore ideas related to self-care, rest, observation, and illness.

Heldens and Yang are no strangers to involuntary idleness. Due to chronic illness, they often find themselves in a weakened state and sometimes even bed bound. Because of the immense amount of time expected by an economic system that prioritizes productivity over health, keeping a conventional studio practice for chronically ill artists can be near impossible. Both artists in this exhibition have found ways to subvert these expectations: Heldens, through a self-generating conceptual approach, and Yang, through routinely embedded lens-based methods.

Heldens’ practice contains self-imposed algorithmic limitations derived from her immediate surroundings, with no definitive solutions. Embedded in the work are codes and keys needed to decrypt their meaning. Like a jigsaw puzzle used to pass the time, paintings like Heldens’ It’s Like, You Know encourage a close and slow reading that emphasizes observation over expediency and an attention to form or formlessness.

The pixel is an object with digital dimensions, yet no inherent physical qualities. Green is a healing color/Green doesn’t sell is a series of 111 individual one-pixel works weighing in at 11 KB each, extracted from various objects in the artist’s studio. Like the mind, they are their own form: amorphous and frameless. When the body is ill, the mind, with deliberate practice, can continue its creative pursuits, assuming the pain is not too great. Perhaps these cerebral pursuits can begin to blur the edges around the body’s form or lack thereof.

Yang is a time traveler. Not one who moves through the past and future, but one who morphs time around her through an active pursuit of stillness. Listening to the rhythms of the body, the mind, and the earth, Yang operates in crip time: a concept used to describe how chronically ill and neurodivergent people experience time and space. In her Passage works, she documents her travels on the waning slow train expeditions on The Silk Road route from Moscow to China. These slow trains are quickly being replaced by high speed counterparts. Through video documentation, she offers viewers a glimpse into the experience of immobile movement. 

In 10,000 Sunsets, Yang uses the sky as a home base for an otherwise nomadic existence. Displaying the work on the floor as a literal and figurative grounding force, each photograph acts as a small celebration of survival. By utilizing a ritualistic practice of photography, Yang embeds art strategies into her everyday existence, and counters the capitalist narrative that art must take excessive time and energy.

In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” The dual citizenship that Sontag references holds true for both artists in this exhibition, although they must travel between kingdoms more frequently than most of us. But through an intentional practice of stillness, observation, and rest, their time spent in the Kingdom of the Sick becomes a place of generative creativity and self-care. 

Price List and Purchase Instructions

Selected Works

Wieteke Heldens graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2007. Since 2010, Heldens has alternately lived and worked in The Hague and New York. In New York, Wieteke is an Artist-in-Residence at the Flux Factory, where her work has been exhibited on numerous occasions. Heldens’ work has been shown internationally, including the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark, South Korea and the United States, among other places. Wieteke has also worked artist in residence in Chongqing, China. In 2013 Heldens won the Royal Prize for Painting in The Netherlands and the O-68 Award from the O-68 gallery in 2017. Wieteke is a recent recipient of a grant from The Mondriaan Fund for her project Behind the Pain’t in New York. Wieteke Heldens is represented by Borzo Gallery in Amsterdam.

Alisa Yang is an antidisciplinary artist and independent filmmaker with a research based practice exploring alternative ways art can be a currency for care. Centering the body as a site of geopolitical and social conditionings, she works across video, installation, and situational specific projects in orienting oneself towards social change. Her films focuses on the experiences of Asian women navigating cultural identity and generational trauma, mining personal narratives with humor and vulnerability. She earned her BFA with honors from Art Center of Design in 2009 and MFA with distinction in Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Michigan in 2016. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally in places like MoMAPS1, Aesthetica Art Prize, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Beijing’s Art Nova 100 with reviews in LA Times, Hyperallergic, and Huffington Post. She recently won the 2018 Special Arte Laguna Prize, Best Regional Filmmaker at 2017 Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the 2017 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival Golden Reel Awards for Short Documentary.

Collect NFT Press Release