My Vivid Kitsch Dream

Review on Meanwhile, the Mise-en-scène, at LATITUDE gallery, New York

Everyday life is now haunted; living now leads straight into banality. Life no longer offers a view of emancipating horizons; life is manufactured and masked by curated dreams and artificial intelligence. Contemporary consumer society makes raw, undigested memory become grey. A hazy grey layer of dust on things is life’s highest faculty today. Meanwhile is haunted by unfulfilled potentials, lost futures of the past, and unpromising visions, unfolding in this exhibition through cinematic street scenes, home interiors, childhood traces, and urban passages. Meanwhile is a vivid kitsch, a dreamlike stage where the unconscious and the inanimate drive meet.

Installation view of Meanwhile, the Mise-en-scène. Courtesy of the artists.

Meanwhile is inertia and introspective, is the rolling process of dreaming: the sphere flows unceasingly in the notebook, in the ceiling, in kitchen cutlery, in the bedroom, in the fish tank, but also in city pedestrians, in intersections, in balcony, where the seemingly insignificant becomes lived. Having attested to what we now define as kitsch, we uncover an unexpected convergence: thinking through Benjamin, it’s not a repeated intrusion of artistic elements into industrial production, but is in fact a spontaneous drift of romantic sentiment and “something stirring, useful, ultimately heartening” (Benjamin [1999]: 395).

Elieen Feng, March, 2025, Oil on canvas mounted on board, 30 x 30 in, 76.2 x 76.2 cm. Monday, 2023, Oil on canvas,

Elieen Feng, March, 2025, 24 x 18 in, 61 x 45.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Kitsch here developed from the domestic environment, the vicinity of the nearby as receptacle, threading through Wendy Wei and Athena Parella’s interior decors and childhood nostalgic regression. The dreamlike style conceives of living not as living in a house, but in a “shell”. 

Da Wang, Crossing in the Rain, 2021, mixed media, crayon, oil and acrylic on canvas, 35 ⅜ x 47 ¼ in, 90 x 120 cm, Courtesy of the artist.

Over the ceiling of the middle-class dining room with its empty plates, over a solitary moment of introspection in the mottled bathroom, over the passionate encounter of lovers on the street. The dimension is akin to a dream, rendering the boundaries between lived and daydreamed evanescent. Da Wang and Pan Inkhoo capture the dreamlikeness of the modern urban landscape, a view marked by continuous alternation of real and subconscious memory and image. The brightly coloured, blurred-brushstroke paintings over doorways, the backyard, the green belt, and the soap plate are the centre of gravity. The repeatedly depicted scenes are an added monument to the eternal home held in memory; it is the ornament of conversation at home that became full of the innermost entanglements. 

“Therein lies deep affection, love — kitsch.” (Benjamin [2008]: 238)

Wendy Wei, Deep Talk, 2026, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Kitsch here also builds on the repetition of worn-out experience, which gives us pause for thought. Jordan Sears and Eileen Feng elaborate on the infinite accessories that make up this dramatisation of living space; the objects represent the way in which the inorganic asserts itself over that which is vital.

Eileen Feng, Baby, 2024. Oil on linen.14 x 12 in.35.6 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

“It is our hands that grasp the exterior surface of things in dreaming and run our fingers over the familiar shape; they rub the things where they are most worn, and caress them. It is the side that has been worn thin by habit and is garnished with irreplaceable maxims. The side that things present to dream is ‘Kitsch.’” (Benjamin [2008]: 238).

Our dreams are blue goldfish, leaping through childhood evocation to what we can remember until now through thousands of repetitions and memories; some dreams are totally alien and need to be examined, and some are easier to digest. The dreams here are constructed not only as a mimetic device through the strategies of borrowing and imitation, but above all as a concealment of alienation in a mise-en-scène that turns out to be a mere process of the sublime. Meanwhile keeps regaining possession of what has vanished through the experience of using objects across time and space, continuing to call back the “incursion through night of the unconscious begins in the screen, and in man: images, as in the dream, appear and disappear amid fades and obscurations” (Buñuel [2022]: 544).

Meanwhile thus becomes the possibility of intercepting not the periphery of the real world but the centre of a psychic world, childhood, memory, dream; otherwise irretrievable. Kitsch, in this sense, is not ordinary objects, not decoration, but the last mask of the banal, the one we put on in dreams and in ordinary talk, to draw into ourselves whatever power remains in a world of things that has already died. Nostalgic memory in consumer society survives only by being worn out and absorbed; this is what Meanwhile stages, again and again, the observing, the halting, the passing, the kissing, recalled now by the present so that something of that dead world’s power might still pass through. Meanwhile keeps adding to this space, night after night, meanwhile after meanwhile, because the outlived world’s energy has nowhere else left to go.

Reference:

Benjamin, W., 1999: The Arcades Project, ed. by R. Tiedemann, transl. by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.).

Benjamin, W., 2008: Dream Kitsch, in Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. by M.J. Jennings, B.

Buñuel, Luis, 2022: Obra literaria reunida, ed. by J. Xifra, Catedra, Madrid.