Art Basel Miami 2024: Peter Blum Gallery's Nicholas Galanin and Su-Mei Tse
By Giuliana Brida
December 12, 2024
What do Indigenous artist Nicholas Galanin and Luxembourgian Su-Mei Tse have in common? At first glance, their artistic trajectories may seem disparate — Galanin, a Lingít and Unangax artist, grapples with the complexities of Indigenous reclamation and the weight of cultural misappropriation, while Tse, a classically trained cellist and photographer, captures the ephemeral poetry of the everyday. Yet, both artists share an ability to translate nuanced identities and layered experiences into works of profound resonance through form and composition, communicating beyond the visible.
Su-Mei Tse’s aura lives in space — grappling time and memory. Her works, steeped in introspection, emerge as meditative reflections on rhythm and ephemeral existence. In one photograph, the life of a single object — a flower, a ceramic, or an indeterminate texture — demands attention not for its simplicity but for its suggestion of something more. In her piece, Eine Handvoll Millionen (2021) translated from German as “a handful of millions”, makes a palmful of salt poignant. Tse’s use of negative space echoes like a held breath, with salt itself, an image containing several dualities — preservation and decay, permanence and transience, life and its inevitable residue.
In contrast, her diptych Gaze Into Deep captures the motion of a serene aquatic scene. Bright red koi fish float over the reflections of a pond, their movements creating a visual rhythm to punctuate the warped, vibrant frame. Light dances across her images with an almost tactile quality, revealing her fascination with the interplay of perception — how sound, sight, and touch converge to shape fleeting yet universal moments. For Tse, art isn’t merely seen or heard, it is felt.
Tse’s contemplations are inherently tied to her own dual heritage of Chinese and British descent. Through much of her work, she maps a quiet dialogue between East and West, using subtle visual metaphors to navigate cultural variance. However, Far Side of the Moon (2022) imagines the unearthly. Like a freehand painting, Tse takes collage images of the moon’s composition, and creates a backside, one never visible from the present perspective. Photography on Dibond, this piece has an understated elegance that demands to be declared.
In contrast, Nicholas Galanin’s work pulsates with urgency. Grounded in his Lingít and Unangax̂ heritage, his piece, Artist Carrying the Weight of Imitation is as powerful in its visual impact as it is profound in concept. The figure, compressed by the weight of a totem pole and rendered with intricate detail, dominates the frame. The subject’s stance is key — bent knees, bare feet pressed into the ground, arms gripping the totem tightly — creating a posture of physical strain, and yet, resting resilience. The piece poses a poignant question: what is the cost of bearing the burden of “imitation,” commodification, and distortion? How are we, as viewers, components of this context and how do we contend with erasure?
Peter Blum Gallery’s presentation at Art Basel Miami 2024 offers a poetic yet unflinching meditation on identity, memory, and cultural narratives through the works of Nicholas Galanin and Su-Mei Tse. Galanin’s urgency collides with Tse’s introspection, creating a dynamic dialogue between reclamation and reflection, between the physical weight of cultural survival and the intangible rhythm of fleeting moments. For Art Basel Miami 2024, this is an invocation of humanity, a visceral reminder of art’s power to bear witness, provoke thought, and bridge the divide between the personal and the universal.