May 22, 2025–June 27, 2025
Micki Meng is pleased to present For Sport, the debut San Francisco solo exhibition of Chinese American painter Amanda Ba and her first show with the gallery. The exhibition features a suite of new figurative paintings that deepen Ba’s exploration of identity, spectacle, and power.
Over the past five years, Ba has gained prominence for her transgressive figurative paintings depicting East Asian female subjects who defy the trope of the idealized, obedient, hyperfeminine woman. Informed by literary theory, anthropology, and her cultural heritage, Ba uses the painted medium as a visual extension of her ongoing inquiry into how power and culture are absorbed and expressed through the body. Whether painting an eroticized, red-fleshed warrior (as in her breakout exhibition The Incorrigible Giantess, 2022) or an otherworldly Titan resting amid the wreckage of an entropic cityscape (as in her 2024 exhibition Developing Desire at Jeffrey Deitch), Ba’s ongoing fascination with uninhibited figures revolves around the interplay of identity and politics.
In For Sport, Ba turns to the environment of athletics. Across seven paintings, she portrays athletes in motion: boxers, skiers, synchronized swimmers, basketball players, weightlifters, and hunters, each drawn from various sources, including sports photography, self-portraiture, and live models she has brought into the studio. Through these bodies in action, Ba examines how competitive sport reflects and reinforces cultural ideologies, national mythologies, and global hierarchies.
Mega-events like the Olympics serve as arenas where heroism, aggression, and eroticism converge, and national power is projected and contested. In Knockout I & II, two female boxers face off beneath the glow of a packed stadium. A devastating right hook lands mid-swing, rippling the contours of the face into malleable putty. Ba's subject winces as beads of sweat and drool fly through the air, epitomizing her interest in the grotesque and mythic heroine while tracing a mythos of modern-day champions.
Diplomacy flexes its hard-bodied, soft power during international competition. In Stack, six synchronized swimmers hover underwater in a geometric formation, bathed in the aquatic light of a pool, the surface undulating overhead. The composition recalls the visual codes of Chinese propaganda posters as well as patriotic Western history paintings like The Oath of the Haratii (Jacques-Louis David, 1784) and Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix, 1830)—works that similarly elevate sacrifice, choreography, and nationalist fervor.
The exhibition’s sole diptych, Weightlift Cycle (Biopower), shows a female bodybuilder in the throes of a “clean and jerk” movement, rendered in sequential stages reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of athletes in motion. Her shirt reads “B-I-O,” a subtle homage to Michel Foucault, author of The Birth of Biopolitics. Muscular, green, and vascular, as if hit by the same gamma-radiation that created the Hulk, she heaves the barbell overhead before slamming it on the ground. The unidealized feminine form returns here in full force, recalling the brutal grandeur of the female bodybuilder incorporated in her painting Rubble Titan (2024) and completing Ba’s circuit between myth and flesh, domination and defiance.
Hunters, the most naturalistic work in the show, depicts a figure participating in the traditionally English aristocratic pursuit of tracking wild birds, or “game,” presumably inhabiting the world beyond her composition. The figure’s face is obscured as she navigates a wintry terrain with a rifle slung over her shoulder. A boisterous and expressive pack of beagles run out of the frame ahead of her, probing the critical division between a primitive activity done for survival and one done “for sport.”
- Lola Kramer
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Born in Ohio to first-generation Chinese American parents, Amanda Ba (b. Columbus, Ohio, 1998) spent the first five years of her life with her grandparents in Hefei, China. Her recent paintings—in which monumental nude figures, often after the artist’s image, inhabit uncanny interiors and evocative urban environments—combine realism and fantasy to explore issues of desire and sexuality, capitalism and nationalism, and diasporic memory through lenses of queer and post-colonial thinking. With a keen interest in curation and artist communities, Ba previously curated a group show at James Fuentes, where her friends and painters (notably Oscar Hou, Dominique Fung, and Sasha Gordon) participated. Ba has been included in group shows at Gladstone and Gagosian, among others, and a recent solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. She holds a B.A. in Visual Arts and Art History from Columbia University, New York.