Yanyan Huang at BANK

Artist: Yanyan Huang

Venue: BANK, Shanghai, China

Date: November 6, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and BANK, Shanghai

Much like a dance or orchestral performance, Yanyan Huang’s painting personifies the whimsical voluptuousness of balletic and operatic forms both in their creation as well as their final compositions. Aiming to create an idealized space of rhythm, nature, and proportion she combines tenets of classical botanical studies, mythology, and the calligraphic arts with a special nod to automatic writing with the shapes and colors in her paintings flowing outward in streams-of-consciousness to form psycho-poetic landscapes.

Marking the artist’s first solo presentation at BANK, the artist presents a selection of recent, mixed media paintings in dialogue with several printed tapestries, drawings and works on paper. The works are of Huang’s most signature series to date, which have been exhibited and published worldwide. In keeping with Huang’s reverence for nature and all forms of orthodox beauty, the presentation is meant to be classical. As performance defines much of Huang’s practice – the performative nature of both making and viewing her paintings – the gallery space is conceived like a stage in which performers are invited to interact. “The creation of reality is a continuous practice” notes Huang “each stroke is a ghostly remainder of a conscious performance”.

Huang’s explicitly ornamental approach is forged by her time spent in Florence, wherein she rejected the fabricated qualities of the contemporary in favor of the hand-made. In Florence mythology, renaissance gardens, the Uffizi, and ancient ruins helped inflect her sensibilities. Yet even though her work is indebted to classicism it is often presented in tandem with digitally printed silk or wall papers, which, along with her instagram performances, act as her 21st century fix. A recent Art Forum review sees her work in dialogue with “Abex’s humanist myths” whereby Huang “lets her abstractions act as signifiers of her own subjectivity which she braids together with other cultures and traditions from ceramics to fashion.”

Born 1988 in Sichuan, China, Yanyan Huang is based between Beijing, New York, and California. Deriving influence from a wide span of cultures and time, her work maps out an elaborate array of temporal geographies, identities, and relationships.

Recent solo shows include “El Baile” at Jelato Love（Palma de Mallorca, Spain）, Cloud Tempo at Salt Projects (Beijing, CN), Nebbia del Tempo at Ibid (Los Angeles, London), Giardino del Tempo at Tomorrow Gallery (New York, NY) and Ex Silentio at CURA’s Basement Roma (Rome, Italy), both in 2016. Notable group shows include Hidden Words at Gallery Vacancy (Shanghai, CN), After Effect “Vapegoat Rising” Arturo Bandini at Ball- room Marfa (2016) and Windoes at The Composing Rooms, Berlin, DE (2015).

Huang’s artworks are in the East West Bank and in the private collections of Zhang Enli, Dominic Ng, Susan and Michael Hort, Kylie Ying, and Michael Xufu Huang and many others. She has been nominated for Forbes 30 under 30.

Yanyan Huang, 2018, exhibition view, BANK, Shanghai

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry 6, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas , 183 x 244 x 5 cm

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry XII, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183 x 5 cm

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry V, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183 x 5 cm

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry XI, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183 x 5 cm

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry XII, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183 x 5 cm

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry IV, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183 x 5 cm

Huang Yanyan, Cloud Poetry X, 2018, Ink, gouache, and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 in, 183 x 244 cm