Meet Me at the Water by Yen Ha
8"x10" ($40) | 11"x14" ($85) | 16"x20" ($275) | 20"x24" ($775) | 30"x40" ($2,650)
Greetings, collectors! Today, we’ve got a brand new edition from artist, architect, writer, cool mom, superwoman, and close friend of 20x200: Yen Ha.
Meet Me at the Water is a sojourn of memory and space. A fleeting glimpse of a pieced-together recollection. Yen began lacing memory into her work with her debut 20x200 print edition, A Full Life, investigating how time shapes memories, oscillating between objective truth and subjective longing. What do we really remember? For Yen, Meet Me at the Water conveys longing for a person who, after twenty-five years together, no longer lives close. It depicts a space they both know, a view they both remember.
This quiet, seaside scene is part of a drawing series titled Stairs Go There. The series—a nod to Yen’s background in architecture—surveys the places that stairs take us and the porosity of physical space. With solid, muted tones and simplistic shapes, this digital drawing—a new medium for Yen—places us mid-memory of a physical location. We are everywhere at once. We are inside looking out the windows toward the ocean. We are outside the pale dune fence looking in. And bisected prominently by the staircase, we are neither up nor down.
Like constructed spaces, memory is also permeable. Tangible features imprint each of us differently. The individual elements of Meet Me at the Water form an optical illusion of space, but taken together ground us in a beach house oasis. For Yen, memory transmutes fluidly over time so that we always have distinctive and ever-changing experiences of remembering.
A polymath in the truest sense of the word, Yen is a modern-day explorer. She ventures out into every crevice of creativity, absorbing and expanding to weave new and dimensional methods of expression. From She Is—original, one-of-a-kind but interrelated works, their titles combining to form a poem—to our Zen with Yen artfully meditative Instagram series, our collaborations with Yen have always been fueled by her hunt for interconnectedness. She harnesses the communicative powers of things like poetry, meditation, and memory to buttress our visual experience of her art. Meet Me at the Water is a full expression of Yen’s metamorphic artistic style. And just like our pervious structures of memory, Yen’s talent as a creative human knows no bounds.
