June 7 - July 19, 2025, pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, California.

pt.2 Gallery is proud to present Yameng Lee Thorp: Ground, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Continuing her practice of surreal abstraction and quiet world-building, Lee Thorp’s newest body of work marks a contemplative shift into a restrained palette of black, white, and red—exploring memory, lineage, and the radical potential of reclamation.

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Ground emerged from a recent trip to China, where Lee Thorp honored her late grandmother and visited ancestral tombs, including the unmarked grave of her grandfather—an artist whose life was cut short during the Cultural Revolution. These paintings become acts of witnessing and repair, weaving memory and presence across generations.

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Working with long horizontal canvases and a singular fan-shaped painting, Lee Thorp reimagines inherited formats through a contemporary lens. Rooted in Chinese painting traditions, the scroll and fan are not merely aesthetic references but conceptual provocations: What happens when women, historically excluded from painting grand landscapes, claim these forms for themselves? One work in particular—34°46'04.9"N 114°22'30.4"E—serves as the emotional core of the exhibition. Referencing the coordinates of her grandfather’s now-paved over and nearly forgotten burial site, the fan-shaped painting becomes a quiet act of mourning and reclamation. By appropriating a format long associated with imperial power and decorative arts, Lee Thorp honors a silenced lineage while forging new terrain from its absence.

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Sparse red stitching appears in select works—delicate marks drawn from memories of sewing with the women in her family. “What if we were given agency to imagine how we want to make the work,” she asks, “knowing what wasn’t allowed but reclaiming it to build a world that women were never allowed to, or dared to, imagine?” 

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Lee Thorp’s landscapes are not topographical but emotional—internal geographies shaped by water, silence, and ancestral presence. “I want the work to go unnoticed on first pass,” she writes, “but truly serve as a Trojan horse for remembering and honoring those whose stories and truths were erased by historical events, and lives that were defined by roles they didn’t choose.”

Following her 2024 exhibition Prologue: Freer than the wind, which centered on resilience and the will to grow, Ground turns toward remembering, mending, and the radical imagination of new worlds—ones that hold what was once lost.

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To see a full show catalogue or inquire about available work please contact:

pt.2 Gallery - info@part2gallery.com