Navi Naisang’s solo exhibition at Tyger Tyger Gallery, Phantom limb, consists of a series of small, gemlike paintings steeped in visual games and color theory. She paints in confident, overt hues and narratives, using plainspoken symbolism to guide imagery that combines the human figure with landscapes, bugs and symbolic shadow forms. There’s a fascinating balance here between play and seriousness as we follow Naisang’s subjects moving through pulsating, hypersaturated landscapes infiltrated by botanicals and insects that arrange themselves in vivid, neon-threaded patterns. Unseen figures positioned just out of the picture plane cast shadows that play across the skin of her subjects, creating uneasy repetitions.

Although Naisang lives in Asheville, her current work has a connection with the desert: “My work exploded with color after living in the vibrant Sonoran landscape, and I think this was the beginning of when I really found my voice as an artist. Since then I’ve fully leaned into dreamlike landscapes and color choices. I just feel so much happier with my current body of work”. With surfaces that are meticulously blended and layered to a velvety finish along with paint marks that are uncanny in their uniformity, Naisang’s tiny worlds vibrate with the cadence of digital screens, dreams, and otherworldliness while maintaining the physicality of the painter’s hand. In her work, figurative elements are close-cropped, existing almost as if they are part of the landscape itself, which is pared down to simple repetitions of pattern and edited color. Sinewy curving forms connect and replicate– a subtle rhythm is implied. Precise and homogenous detail, asymmetry within symmetry, and other balancing factors of color and imagery across every inch of these brightly lit scenes, imbuing her work with a sense of artificiality. Hot gradients combined with heady stylization are immediately reminiscent of the candied light of cartoon worlds, even when many of the scenes are night visions.

Jung’s concept of the shadow self, the Dark feminine, and body memory are a few of the artist’s main fixations. “When I took the first leap to embrace my own style a couple years ago, it began as the image of a ghost. I had this ghost in several paintings interacting with the figures and for me it was a symbol of the unconscious shadow self”, she explains. “I quickly got sick of the motif and didn’t like the box I was putting myself in by having this cartoonish ghost in otherwise serious paintings. I still wanted to use a “shadow”, however. I solved the problem by leaning into playing with the actual shadows of my figures and their surroundings”.

Naisang draws inspiration from contemporary painters like Jenny Morgan, whose latest revelatory works are mystical visions rendered in transitory, shimmering spatial and pictorial illusions, as well as readings from Anais Nin and June Singer, to name just a few. She explained to me that her paintings are a contemporary play on the notion of the wild uncontrollable woman, like those represented in the tales of Persephone, Lilith, and Ereshkigal. The delightful part is how she gets at this from a masterfully lighthearted angle, with images that deliberately reference the visual language of camera phones which enable us to crop, modify, and re-present aspects of ourselves through selfies and adjacent self-referential images.

Phantom limb, the painting that the exhibition is named after, features a nude female torso painted in a vivid rosy tone, edged with pale blue light, reclining in the grass, hands twining together over the solar plexus, hinting at the unknown thoughts of the subject. Luna moth, neon-green caterpillars crawl through the short grasses, inching onto the figure itself, perhaps signifying transformation or intuitive psychic perception. A shadow of a hand hovers directly over the figure, as if representing a memory of the touch of another. “I wanted people to think about what kind of touch is happening to the figure, and whether or not it is consensual”, the artist explains. “I also played with the idea that this could be the memory of a touch, hence the name Phantom limb. A phantom limb is a psychological phenomenon where you feel pain in a place on your body that no longer exists. I think most people have situations from their past that can sometimes resurface and still cause pain, even though the moment is long gone”.

A tradition in ancient Asian culture where a jade beetle is placed on the tongue of the deceased to represent rebirth or luck in the afterlife was the inspiration for Posthumous night swim. In this happy-seeming night swim painting, a young woman sticks her tongue out as she emerges from the water- an image that feels very much alive, and very of our time, as if scrolling it on an Instagram feed. A beetle hovers overhead and casts its shadow on her tongue. This painting is joyous while staying dead serious, in a giddy depiction of the hope of a vital, sexy afterlife.

Navi’s life imitates her art, too. She currently has two pet caterpillars named Munchie and Crunchie that officially cocooned themselves in the days before the reception for Phantom limb. They may meaningfully emerge while her show at Tyger Tyger Gallery is still up, and once they become Luna moths, she plans on introducing them as Stella and Phantom. In a recent email, she told me “I’ve been a bug gal my whole life. The stories range from me bringing in a pocketful of bug friends to nap with as a kid, to me not willing to complete my ballet dance recitals without arriving with my giant caterpillar that my mom duck-taped in a container so the other girls wouldn’t freak out.”

The show’s largest painting, Beneath Unconscious Depths, is in the artist’s own words “a play on the idea of the unconscious as a living, thriving ecosystem”. The face peers inside the water as if accessing it through a portal. “Dreams have often been said to be the most direct link to the unconscious that we have, so I wanted this painting to look like a visual representation of connecting with the unconscious”, she says. The inclusion of Koi fish, symbolizing knowledge, starts to create a sense that these paintings are like maps showing us the way to self-realization.

Integration of the shadow is the only painting that doesn’t use the presence of an uncanny other to cast a shadow. This piece outlines psychoanalytic theory’s promise for a process of incorporation of the traumatized parts of the self that so often lurk in our unconscious, maddeningly steering our conscious actions in ways we don’t easily understand. Two hands intertwine with moonflowers, which are ironically a night-blooming version of morning glories, enhancing Naisang’s love of symmetry in a different way. There is no shadow hand shown here: just two corporeal hands adorned with vines, flowers, and a couple of spiders communing with them. Everything is revealed and blossoming within the cast shadow portion of the painting, acknowledging the necessary journey through that which has wounded us in order to bloom into wholeness.

Navi Naisang is an emerging artist who received her BFA from Western Carolina University. Her work has been exhibited in North Carolina, New York and Arizona. She has been awarded with artist residencies at the New York Academy of Art and the Vermont Studio Center. She currently lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina.