Amanda Ba: Contemplating Desire and Urbanization

Amanda Ba: Developing Desire, a small showcase of the titular artist’s works from the past year, debuted at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in September. Ba’s primary subject is the nude Asian female body, upscaled into gargantuan titanesses that tower over the regular-sized world. In Developing Desire, Ba—who was born in Ohio but spent her early childhood in Hefei— places her characteristic titans into present-day Chinese cities. The “desire” Ba’s exhibit explores is state-authorized capitalistic greed and expansion. Her paintings reflect on China’s rapid development, from massive real-estate ventures to dominance in the global economy. She paints her titans ravaging and destroying cities, presenting a clash between the natural, physical wants of the individual and the materialistic desires for property triggered by existence in a state capitalist society.

Ba focuses on metropolises; the titans take nonmoving positions, emphasizing the landscape as the true subject. In Rubble Titan (2024), the titan sits in a city’s wreckage under an apocalyptic, yellow sky; the titan in River Titan (2024) lies in the Huangpu River by Shanghai, with light, lime-tinted skin that blends in with the polluted green waters. The viewpoint of Blueprint Titan (2024) is a bird’s eye view; in it, a nude titan stares upward at the viewer. She stands in the middle of a city, with cars surrounding her on a circular highway. The buildings shine in varied, desaturated colors. Her feet create large cracks in the ground, but she appears irreverent to the destruction she is causing. Her face is filled with gleeful awe; she dons a toothy grin, and her eyes are widened. Her arms are wide open, pointing downward. She’s surrounded by skyscrapers, but she doesn't even acknowledge them—her attention is focused on the sky. Since the woman’s body dominates most of the canvas’s space, her carefreeness defines the work’s ambiance. The painting extols her embracement of her nudity; it relegates the city’s ruination to a subtle background quirk—the cracks are faint, and there don’t appear to be any victims. Ba portrays the destruction as simply a byproduct of the woman’s blissful existence. The painting is a representation of a primal, natural euphoria completely razing the industrialized world with zero qualms.

 The works in Developing Desire take inspiration from Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who interpreted Freudian desire as inherently tied to social structures. In an interview with AnOther Magazine, Ba elaborated that “The Lacanian idea of desire is that it’s constantly frustrated [...] You find things that are good substitutes, but when you get them, you realize they are false, and the desire is rekindled.” Blueprint Titan evokes the fragility of fulfillment from capitalist success, the “good substitute.” The city—a product of development from numerous corporations over multiple years—is destroyed by the energy of just one individual. The painting’s scene implies that the artificial urges fulfilled by wide-scale development will always be superseded by natural, physical desire.

The gallery’s mezzanine contains the video triptych More Future (2024), a collaboration between Ba and her partner, Justine Cheng. After a sequence of fantastical paintings portraying Chinese cities, More Future includes real-world shots of expansive skyscrapers and city streets, highlighting the similarities between the exhibit’s dystopian urban landscapes and reality. The video’s intro is an aerial view of urban China: lines of cars, identical apartment buildings, construction sites, garbage piling on the streets, and abandoned train stations. USA For Africa’s charity anthem, “We Are the World” (1985), a celebration of cosmopolitanism, plays in the background, jarringly juxtaposing with the bleak imagery. When the music ends, the video displays scenes of everyday life in modern China: dancers rehearsing in a studio, security camera shots of a parking lot, and a social media influencer recording a video on the street. Meanwhile, a voiceover delivered by Ba’s father contemplates history, philosophy, and culture; it quotes Freud and Foucault, and shares historical anecdotes relating to China’s interactions with the West. The voiceover comments on Buddhist non-materialism while displaying shots of Buddha statues sitting in nature. It’s a departure from the buildings and construction sites that permeate the rest of the video, emphasizing the disparity between Buddhism’s prominence in Chinese culture and the perpetually unsatisfied greed of Chinese developers—who are constantly building, destroying, and reconstructing new real estate for profit.

At the end of the video, a news report plays over more shots of skyscrapers. The report describes China’s increased presence in African countries, where the nation has continued its economic rivalry with the United States in competition for rare earth minerals. Right before the video ends, the report grimly asserts that “the future is in Africa, and China owns that future.” By the end of More Future, the global cooperation extolled in “We Are the World” becomes daunting. China’s sprawling urban development has expanded to other continents since its Lacanian desire for economic dominance will never be quenched. Despite their already-imposing nature, the cities that appear in both Ba’s paintings and More Future are still growing; the never-ending cycle of capitalism generates desire that is forever unfulfilled, which necessitates a constant increase in production and development. 

The nude titans in Developing Desire may endow the exhibit with aesthetic otherworldliness, but the exhibit’s actual disturbing quality is grounded in reality: Ba’s cities, haunting reminders of the seemingly all-consuming urban growth that endangers the world.