Fantasy and humor are fundamental to the work of Los Angeles–based artist Pearl C. Hsiung, a recent Goldsmiths grad whose work is focused on painting but also extends into installation. The six large paintings on view in “To the Big Life,” her second show in London, present scenes from a manga-influenced sci-fi realm whose inhabitants—for so they seem, rather than the bits of scenery one might think they ought to be—are, for example, some ludicrously precarious outcrop of rock that seem to hover in the clouds, one of them capped by a cracked and empty shell and a pink bow (Bros Geodorous, 2005),

According to the catalogue accompanying the show (now at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin), Orla Barry’s Portable Stones, 2005, indicates “the limits that apply to putting any flow of ideas into words. The impossibility of language and communication plays an important part in the film. Language as an obstacle that creates distance and can result in loneliness.” The inherent contradiction in such assertions of language’s inadequacy is that they are themselves made with language. Language can’t accomplish its own disappearance, but it can eloquently gesture toward the inner wordlessness—the