Michael Abel Deng’s Lucky Duck at gallery Two Seven Two shimmers in a hybridized cacophony of mistranslations and multicultural encounters, incubated through its own affectual inventory atop the canvas. The paints and brushstrokes bounce off fleeting moments of intensity that are collected, recollected, multiplied, and metamorphosed into unstable categories of identity that reject fixed definition. 

Abel’s self-portraits can be read as a form of self-representation caught in a multicultural slippage that mistranslates conventions of self-portraiture, leaving him often absent from the canvas. Instead, Bill Zhou, a made-up Chinese cowboy whose last name is born from the nominal misnomer of Abel’s grandmother, stands in for Abel himself in the form of a gimrack purchased from eBay. His fictional double traverses spaces of hybridity, where he contends with Christ and ghostrides in North American suburbs. 

Similarly, Abel inserts traces of himself as a dynastic horse figurine, in reference to his Chinese zodiac, lying on top of the plateless dining table at Mr. Chow’s in New York City, in a position of defeat. To Abel, the idea of an origin and the self functions more as a quasi-myth than an actuality, enacting as a doppleganger of melancholic fascinations and partially construed nostalgia. 

Abel also conveys a gravitas toward feudal royalty. The jade burial suit, although deemed an immemorial relic of past royalties, becomes a mirage when its class signification is caught in the transitional period between feudalism and the emergence of a Chinese nation-state. It becomes its own form of identitarian concealment, gilded in glamour, constructed and highly performative, and its allure is not so different from the imagined prosperities attached to the gold mountains. 

Racism treads beside trails of gold, and the pastoral landscapes are not always so pure. It manifests as The Souvenir stamped with the line, “The Chinese Must Go”; as transient havens born out of the precarious solidarity with miners and railroad workers seeking a fortune, like The Old Tong in Barkerville, BC; or as hybridized architecture like Kaiping Diaolou (开平碉楼) brought home by those rejected entry from exclusion laws. 

Lucky Duck, while a whimsical slang for good fortune, captures a moment in Chinese-Canadian history caught between the out-migrants’ aspiration for fortune and the reality of exclusion. As the Daoist proverb says, “Fortune hides within misfortune; misfortune leans on fortune” (福兮祸所伏，祸兮福所倚). In some ways, Abel forms spaces of friction suspended in an impasto of Chinese-Canadian history, hidden beneath a phantasmagoria of glid and shimmer, but activated through his affectual encounter with its residues and fragments, layered onto his own migratory journeys and manifested in the space in-between. 

Text by Yantong Li

Michael Abel Deng (b. 1990, Didsbury, Alberta, Canada) is a painter and architect based in New York City. His paintings explore translation, mistranslation, and the slippages of multicultural encounter, moving between figuration, self-portraiture, and abstraction. He is Chief Design Officer at Homer and co-founder of the architecture practice Abel Nile New York (ANY). His work has been exhibited at YveYANG Gallery and Anonymous Gallery (New York), Amity & Carlyle Packer (Los Angeles), and Biennale Architettura (Venice), as well as Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), X Space (Toronto), Whitehouse (Tokyo), and Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary). He has published in Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, LOG, KALEIDOSCOPE, and PIN-UP. He guest-edited Flash Art Volumes with Nile Greenberg and is a Graham Foundation grantee. Abel Deng received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Calgary (2012) and Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto (2016).