Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Myriad: The Garden of Infinite Paths, a solo exhibition by artist Emi Avora, curated by Virginie Puertolas-Syn.
In Borges's story The Garden of Forking Paths, a Chinese scholar conceives of time not as a corridor moving in one direction, but as a garden — branching, proliferating, endlessly forking, every possible moment alive alongside every other. It is a garden you move through rather than observe: each step a choice, each choice a path taken and a thousand paths left open. The metaphor is deliberately sensory — not a diagram or an equation, but something lush and overgrown, full of beauty and complexity in equal measure, closer to silk and stone than to mathematics. It is this image of time — as a space where multiple realities coexist without cancelling one another — that shapes Emi Avora's new body of work. Opening on 15 May at Mandy Zhang Art, The Garden of Infinite Paths brings together paintings that function less like windows than like thresholds — surfaces in which multiple possibilities, multiple geographies, multiple moments coexist without resolution. To stand before one of her canvases is to enter a world governed by its own internal logic, where colour is structural rather than descriptive, and where the gap between the real and the imagined becomes a space of genuine wonder.
These paintings do not narrate a sequence; they propose a simultaneity. Past and present seem to occupy the same inch of ground. A particular quality of light collapses decades; a familiar plant conjures two continents at once. The viewer is not positioned outside the work but drawn into its field, navigating between recognition and abstraction, between the intimate and the oceanic, between arrival and the perpetual suggestion of elsewhere.
Avora was born in Athens in 1979 and grew up on the island of Corfu, where her father — himself a painter — kept a studio at home. At seventeen she left Greece for England, completing a BA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and an MA at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Her subsequent move to Singapore introduced the second great current in her practice. The work now holds two worlds in suspension: the bleached light and classical figuration of the Mediterranean, and the saturated chromatic density of Southeast Asia. These are not reconciled so much as allowed to coexist — simultaneously, without hierarchy, without resolution.
Colour is the primary instrument of this suspension — and here a particular lineage becomes relevant. When the Fauves broke from naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century, they asserted colour as an autonomous force, independent of description. Matisse took this furthest: in his great interiors, colour becomes enveloping, joyful, structurally necessary — the canvas a site of disciplined excess where pattern and hue absorb the world rather than merely depict it. Avora inherits this freedom, but charges it with something new. Her palette carries geographical and cultural memory — a magenta that holds the frangipani of a Singapore garden; a viridian that recalls both Ionian pine and equatorial canopy; an ochre that is simultaneously Corfu stone and tropical earth. These colours do not illustrate her biography; they enact it, as competing possibilities held in tension within the same field.
Her subjects are drawn from the overlooked and the ordinary: interiors, still lives, plants, animals, statues encountered in daily life. Observed and imagined things meet within these compositions, bending quotidian matter toward the oneiric. Figures appear — human, animal, sculptural — yet resist conventional narrative. They are presences rather than protagonists. A body's contour softens into foliage; a still life dissolves into a geometry of colour planes; a face re-emerges from what seemed to be pure mark-making. Figuration is not a destination but one path through the picture, where other paths are always also available.
Taken together, the works in Myriad form a living pictorial system — one that holds within it the memory of colour learned in a painter's studio on a Greek island, the chromatic intensities of equatorial light, and the infinite generative potential of a practice that has never stopped asking what painting, at its most open, might still be capable of.
