Yan Xinyue: Revisit: Shanghai

Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present “Revisit”, Yan Xinyue’s (b. 1992, China) second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will be on view at Capsule Shanghai from May 25 to August 10, 2024.

 

The paintings evoke both a sense of rootedness and the experience of exile; and it is in this very contradictoriness that one discovers their wealth of emotion. For the exhibition title, Yan has chosen “Revisit” – a single word, a verb that in many ways encapsulates the underlying desire uniting these works. Like many young Chinese artists in recent years, Yan has chosen to move abroad in order to attain a new perspective, a new angle on her subjects that, very often, only distance can provide. This distancing, and the sense of both loss and discovery that it entails, serves as the theme of the exhibition.

 

With stunning immediacy, the paintings plummet us into a confrontation with estrangement and nostalgia. Though the crowded airport tarmac depicted in Awaiting, 2023, is wholly of the artist’s own invention, it nonetheless resonates with those scenes of departure that so many of us have endured over the years. The center of the painting is the burning sun in the upper right half, which seems to endow everything its rays touch with the deepest hues of yellow, burning the pavement directly below it with the glaring heat of a pre-sunset summer desolation. What we are awaiting here, of course, is departure. Where we’re going hardly matters, not in this captured moment. “Awayness,” distance, is the cold hard fact with which we’re confronted, in spite of the painting’s colorful warmth.

 

Figures in landscapes – studies, really, of figures and their relationships to their surroundings, as the titles alone make bluntly clear – are another recurring preoccupation of these paintings. Him and His Landscape, 2024, uses the term in a rather loose sense: rather than the view of some exterior scene as we tend to connote “landscape” – particularly in a classical painterly sense – we have an interior shot from above of a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has visited a mega-mall in Asia: that of the express multi-floor escalator. The “him” depicted here appears, from afar, like a banal figure, save for the addition of blue wings surrounding his person. In fact, he is a walking advertisement – workers are paid by firms to wear these wings with commercial messaging printed upon them. From this distance, he appears otherworldly, out of place in this empty palace of consumption; his distant likeness gains our affection when we realize how very deeply he in fact belongs to this environment.

 

The obverse of this painting, Her with Her Landscape #1, 2024, painted upon long, thin wooden panels, is a nocturnal sky turned purple by the fireworks illuminating it. Beneath this breathtaking scene, splayed out on a clifftop at the very bottom of the painting, is a young woman who resembles the artist herself. In fact, the artist – or else a figure that is meant to stand in for her – recurs in many of these works. It is as though she needs to temporarily view herself from the outside in order to come to terms with these new locales in which she finds herself situated. Painting each day in her sun-drenched studio in downtown Los Angeles, Yan experiences both the joys and wonder of experiencing a new, foreign environment, while at the same time longing to discover where and how she herself might fit in. Self-portraiture is but one of the ways that artists throughout time have sought to anchor themselves, regardless as to whether their sensation of being adrift is real or wholly imagined; in this, Yan’s painterly approach is both deeply empathic and firmly rooted in an art historical lineage.

 

Grappling with the metaphysics of estrangement, alienation, and longing that are well known to all expatriates who, for one reason or another, have elected to leave their homelands behind, Yan Xinyue puts forth a moving elegy in the paintings comprising “Revisit” that will resonate with all who have set forth on journeys wherein a concrete idea of return is far from certain.

 

Text by Travis Jeppesen