In Dana Lok’s intricate figurative paintings, visual transformations coupled with unexpected and often counter-intuitive vantage points tease at the seams of how signs and representations express meaning. Each distinct body of work engages a range of specific ideas or problems as they undergo a translation from language to visualization, with the paintings recording all the distortions, spontaneous slippages, and sleight-of-hand substitutions at play to bridge the gulf between thought and image. Lok’s paintings stage a heightened and at times surreal drama of compositional space in which different modes of knowledge and meaning-making are both props and actor, theater set and subject. Threading delicate tensions between signifiers, images in Lok’s work gesture to their absent opposites, hidden in the shadows or just out of frame. Like a magician’s trick, optical cues abound, distracting the viewer while subtly pointing to the fact that there is always more going on than meets the eye.
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2023
Dana Lok (b. 1988, Berwyn, PA) received an MFA from Columbia University in 2015 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. In 2018, Lok was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Solo exhibitions of her work include A Body for Your Thoughts, Clima, Milan (2026); As Syllable from Sound, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2024); Closer to the Metal, Clima, Milan (2023); Part and Parse, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2022); One Second Per Second, PAGE, New York (2020); Words Without Skin, Clima, Milan (2019); Mind’s Mouth, Bianca D’Allessandro, Copenhagen (2018); Soft Fact, Clima, Milan (2017); and The Set of All Sets, Chewday’s, London (2016). Selected group shows include Everything looks dark now, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2026), Pharmakon, Galerie Chantal Crousel (2026), Eye of the Blackbird, Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA (2025); Anything But Here, Candice Madey, New York (2025); Strange Sensation, Foyer LA, Los Angeles (2024); darling, your head’s not right, curated by Danica Lundy, François Ghebaly, New York (2023); Anything can pass before the eyes of a person, Derosia, New York (2023); X PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing (2023);Le Biscuit à Soupe, High Art, Arles, France (2022); Gravity, a proposal, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2022); Fifteen Painters, Andrew Kreps Gallery (2021); PAGE (NYC), Petzel Gallery (2021); and In Place Of, curated by Leah Pires, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2016), all in New York. Her work is held in the collections of Espacio 2021, La Palma; Pinault Collection; and X Museum, Beijing. In 2026, Lok’s online artist project A Hole for a Hand was published in Triple Canopy, Issue 30.