Summary
Micki Meng in San Francisco is currently presenting For Sport by Amanda Ba through June 27.
In a showcase of seven figurative paintings, Ba examines the cultural mythos embedded in sports, spectacle and athleticism.
As the NBA Finals heats up, a new exhibition in San Francisco invites us to consider the stories that empower our beloved games. At Micki Meng, Chinese American painter Amanda Ba presents For Sport, her debut solo exhibition in the NorCal hub, turning to the language of athleticism — bodies in motion, muscles under tension – as a means to explore deeper themes of identity, spectacle and power.
The works on view build off the ideas in Ba’s Developing Desire exhibition staged at Jeffrey Deitch last fall, this time zeroing in on the psychosexual drama of high-performance sport. In this showcase of seven figurative paintings, a newly conjured cast of characters take on the likes of boxers, hunters, synchronized swimmers, basketball players, weightlifters and skiers. While embodying the grit and grace of their respective games, the East Asian female protagonists push against stereotypes of obedience and hyperfemininity, asserting strength, agency and emotional complexity in their intensely muscular presentations.
In a recent interview with Dazed, Ba cited last year’s Paris Olympics as a key inspiration: “It’s such a nationalistic display of soft power,” she said. “And it’s so easy, for me even, to be influenced by judgments of those moments and project them onto a view of an entire nation.” Here, mega-events, like the Olympics, act as arenas where “heroism, aggression and eroticism” play out in every pose, every punch. More than affirming a hometown or namely national pride, Ba explores how these competitions dually reinforce and refract cultural mythos and global hierarchies.
Highlights include “Knockout I & II,” where two female boxers face off beneath stadium lights, their confrontation both brutal and balletic, echoing struggles beyond the ring. Additionally, “Hunters” depicts a figure traveling amid a pack of beagles. With a shotgun slung over the shoulder and face shadowed by the bill of a Sherlock’s hat, the piece rides the line between a “primitive activity” — done in the name of survival and “for sport.”
The exhibition is now on view in San Francisco through June 27.
Micki Meng Bayview
1720 Armstrong Ave.,
San Francisco, CA 94124
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