An Ocean Between: Keiko Moriuchi, Wang Mengsha, Komie Kim Le

September 15 - October 25, 2025

An Ocean Between
Keiko Moriuchi, Wang Mengsha, Komie Ki Le

September 15 - October 25, 2025
Press Contact: info@laurathegallery.com

Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX
laura@laurathegallery.com

Laura (the gallery) is pleased to present An Ocean Between, an intergenerational exhibition featuring the work of Keiko Moriuchi (b. 1943, Osaka), Wang Mengsha (b. 1982, Wuxi), and Komie Kim Le (b. 1999, Houston). On view September 15 through October 25, 2025, the exhibition spans over eight decades and traverses geographies from Japan to China to the Vietnamese diaspora in Texas, exploring how women artists of Asian descent inherit, interrogate, and reinvent visual languages across time and place.

The title An Ocean Between invokes both separation and connection: the vast aqueous divide that distances continents and histories, yet also the persistent undercurrents that resurface like tides, binding disparate shores of human experience. Rather than positing a linear genealogy, the exhibition proposes a poetics of relation: an intertidal zone where visual traditions, personal mythologies, and diasporic subjectivities ebb and flow in perpetually shifting confluence.

At the center of this constellation is Keiko Moriuchi, the last artist to join the Gutai Art Association and the sole artist invited to join by its founder, Jirō Yoshihara. Now in her eighth decade, Moriuchi continues to forge paintings of astonishing corporeality and spiritual resonance. Working directly from the tube, she builds sculptural terrains of Liquitex acrylic, later encasing them in sheets of 24-karat and white gold leaf that peel like birch bark, revealing the raw topography beneath. These gleaming strata evoke both Buddhist mandalas and baroque excess, simultaneously cosmological and visceral. Her canvases bear the weight of Gutai's radical performativity while channeling her formative relationships with modernist titans—Ad Reinhardt, her former landlord and neighbor; Isamu Noguchi, her guardian; and Matsumi Kanemitsu—into devotional objects charged with the alchemical and transcendent. Entering a meditative trance while painting, Moriuchi embeds coded messages, letters, and numbers that even she cannot remember, allowing the work to emerge from a space beyond conscious intention. Her mythological "donut peach" appears like a sacred symbol, while gold serves not as mere surface but as purifier, conduit for healing, and energy line between earth and heaven.

Where Moriuchi crystallizes postwar avant-garde transformed into spiritual artifact, Wang Mengsha advances a counterpoint rooted in literati traditions and the unruly lyricism of Xieyi brushwork. Born into an artistic family in Wuxi—hometown of the eminent Walasse Ting—Wang synthesizes her animation training with classical ink idioms, creating paintings where court maidens, Daoist spirits, gourd vases, stone lanterns, and Tang dynasty allusions float across silk and paper in chromatic abundance. Her works destabilize the conventions of traditional court painting, infusing the genre with hallucinatory vitality and contemporary irreverence. Educated across China, Australia, and the United Kingdom, Wang mobilizes ornament and figuration not as static inheritance but as living palimpsest: a reanimation of ink's capacity for spontaneity, humor, and feminine unruliness. In Wang's hands, history is neither fixed nor monumental but porous, whimsical, and insistently present.

The youngest voice, Komie Kim Le, situates this dialogue within the lived realities of Houston's Vietnamese diaspora. A second-generation Vietnamese-American artist born in the 1990s, Komie transforms ceramics into sites of exuberant hybridity and cultural translation. Her stacked, ornamented, and precariously balanced vessels incorporate fragments of immigrant memory: fish sauce bottles, pomelos, blue crabs, steamer baskets entangled with the saturated iconographies of American childhood. Đặc biệt (2024) exemplifies her maximalist aesthetic: a towering ceramic assemblage where a red steamer basket supports a hot plate crowned by a golden piggy bank wearing sunglasses, topped with a pyramid of porcelain palm reading cards. The sculpture trembles with the tension of balance and the weight of generational inheritance. Her Fish Sauce Pot (2023) reimagines the beloved Three Crab brand as a ceramic vessel adorned with anchovies, Vietnamese treats, and American goldfish crackers, while actual Cheetos, dragon fruit, and lychees spill onto pedestals like offerings from an abundant altar. As Komie articulates: "I inherited a love for sour-smelling fish sauce and pungent durian all while immersed in Cartoon Network and blasting Spice Girls... I am Vietnamese but can't speak it; I eat the food but can't cook it." Through glaze and grit, she articulates what she calls her "naïve yet prideful" inheritance of Vietnamese-ness: a second-hand, second-generation subjectivity that is both estranged from and intimately tethered to its roots.

An Ocean Between transforms the gallery into a luminous tide pool, where works by the three artists shimmer like pearls, abalone, and sea urchins awaiting discovery. The exhibition unfolds as both passage and threshold: from Moriuchi's gilded mandalas through Wang's ethereal apparitions to Komie's exuberant ceramics, viewers traverse a symbolic ocean of time, lineage, and cultural imagination.

Together, these practices articulate a shared oceanic poetics: diaspora as both rupture and communion, tradition as both burden and renewal. An Ocean Between invites reflection not upon singular narratives of cultural belonging, but upon what is held in the liminal space between: between ancient traditions and contemporary expression, between centuries and continents, between the fish sauce that connects generations and the Cheetos that mark their distance, between memory and its perpetual reinvention.

For inquiries or additional materials, please contact laura@laurathegallery.com.