"Gold Amidst Dust" Contemporary Dance

Gold Amidst Dust

Contemporary Dance

On the occasion of One Piece, Kaifan Wang's first solo exhibition at BLUM Los Angeles, artists Gema Galiana and Emily Meister reinterpret the trajectories and gestures of Wang’s painterly abstractions through contemporary dance movement. Performed amidst the paintings, the movement piece is accompanied by the score Gold Amidst Dust, produced by Chang Xu.

This event is free and open to all. RSVP is encouraged.

Please note this event will be filmed; by attending, participants and visitors consent to video and audio recording and its publication and reproduction.

Limited parking available. Rideshare highly encouraged.

About Kaifan Wang

Kaifan Wang (b. 1996, Hohhot, China) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied in Shanghai and Florence before completing his Fine Arts education at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany in 2022. Wang has exhibited his work in prominent group exhibitions, including Out of Silence: A Yuz Foundation Collection, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2024); Supercrowds/Super community, TANK Shanghai, China (2024); Bordercrossing: Possibilities and Interactions, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); Briefly Gorgeous, Songwon Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Temporary Chapter, Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin, Germany (2022); Caused BY Hair, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); and FLUXUS+Studis, FLUXUS+ Museum, Potsdam, Germany (2019). Wang was featured in Influential 2023: Forbes China Contemporary Young Artists and won the Ivan Juritz Prize 2022, funded by King’s College London and Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy. He also received the HypoVereinsbank KunstCUBEs One-Year Artist Grant. The first monograph of his work will be released in October 2024.

About Gema Galiana

Gema Galiana is a versatile Spanish-American artist thriving in various roles as a theatre artist, choreographer, and photographer. She co-founded The Useless Room, where she focuses on creating performances and training methods that prioritize physical expression. Galiana's unique approach to her craft stems from her intensive three-year training at the Grotowski Institute in Poland, where she honed her skills alongside esteemed choreographers like Matej Matejka, Milan Kozánek, and DV8 collaborator and ballet dancer-performer Vivien Wood.

Her creative repertoire includes pieces such as ÍNSULA, The Last One, and The Woman Decomposed. She has also contributed as a creator and performer in projects like EXILE, directed by Vivien Wood, and All The Things You Said You Never Said Before You Thought You Could Ever Say, commissioned and premiered at Dance City, UK.

Galiana's work has been showcased on prestigious stages globally, including the Festival Bharat Rang Mahotsav in New Delhi, Summerhall in Edinburgh, The Theatre Olympics, and London's Oval House. Since 2015, she has been based in Los Angeles, where she continues to create captivating work for venues such as Human Resources, the Neutra VDL House, The Electric Lodge, and The Dance Festival at Odyssey Theatre.

Her passion for artistic exploration and collaboration fuels her dedication to pushing creative boundaries while leaving a lasting impact on the arts community. In 2018, she had the honor of collaborating as a performer in Efi Birba’s unique vision of Quixote, Chapter 23rd Second Book, which premiered in Athens, Greece. She also contributed as a movement director in Perform of Self by Jodie Landau, which premiered at National Sawdust in NYC in 2024 and was produced by BMP.

Currently she is pursuing her MFA at California Institute of the Arts.

About Emily Meister

Emily Meister is a dance theatre artist, choreographer, director, producer, experimental filmmaker, and educator with years of experience devising theatrical, site-specific, immersive, and interactive works both intimate and large scale. She has had the pleasure of working with Fire Trial Films, The Private Theatre of NYC, Galiana + Nikolchev's The Useless Room, Annie Saunders/Wilderness, Pussy Riot, Roya Carreras, HomeLA, Meredith Monk, Jeremy Nelson, Delaram Pourabdi, Dim Mak, Roya Carreras, Jay Carlon, Riactor, Nugent Dance, Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Summer Dance, and Motion Theater Dance Company. Her passions lie in experiential learning, in connection, creating spaces, and in collaborating to co-create. Her aesthetic originates from a sensory-based exploratory process, drawing upon breath, energy, movement, sound, and listening/reacting to an environment. She is grounded in a place of wonder and discovery, and is in a constant state of exploration of various ways of being. A steward of the earth, in both healing and physical arts, she dives deep into investigation, and integrates these elements into her way of being and artistic practices. Meister currently serves as Director of The Artists' Lab and the BFA Performing Arts Program in Content Creation at AMDA College of the Performing Arts in Hollywood, CA.

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