Empty Gallery is pleased to present Oax.D.F.L.A.N.O.H.K, Mexican-American artist EKTOR GARCIA’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Working between the media of ceramics, sculpture, textiles, and metalwork, garcia’s practice synthesizes an interest in traditional folk-crafts with queer and Chicanx aesthetics. His sculptural assemblages gesture towards a process of intersubjective meaning-making in which embodied histories are made manifest through the intelligence of the hands and the affective sphere of internal time. 

Oax.D.F.L.A.N.O.H.K., the cryptic neologism which garcia has chosen as the title for this exhibition, is an abbreviated list of the different locales inhabited by the artist during the gestation of these works: Oaxaca, Mexico City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Hong Kong. These were the national lines (different time-zones, cultures, political situations, trade-routes) criss-crossed by the artist’s body, and his works; fragile vessels hurtling through the fraught (but still sublime) interstices of cumulus clouds and air traffic control towers. It may seem strange to speak of travel during this particular moment of closed borders and restricted movement. However, the sense of spiritual restlessness, of perpetually re-negotiated borders and interstices, (and by extension, of dwelling within the transitory and liminal) invoked by garcia’s title are fundamental to the being of the works themselves.