For Sport (2025)
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For Sport
Micki Meng, SF
May 22—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.
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.”