Capsule Shanghai is delighted to host "Summer Mist", the first solo exhibition of Yan Xinyue, featuring her paintings from the past two years. The exhibition opens on August 12, 2020.
Yan graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Art Antwerp (Belgium) with a MFA in painting in 2018. Having grown up in Guangzhou and currently based in Shanghai, she draws inspiration from her experiences with and observations of rapidly developing urbanization, and infuses vignettes of city life with a dose of romance and playfulness.
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Yan Xinyue | Video Interview
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Pertinently titled "Summer Mist", the exhibition features a group of new works in which Yan has painted lifelike waterdrops in the foreground, creating the illusion of an invisible pane of glass between the viewer and the subjects. There is naturally an innate intimacy in the action of sharing an umbrella or a bike. The subjects, shrouded in a tranquility of blue, seem to share a relationship as misty as the rainy summer in Shanghai.
On the other hand, while Sisyphus in 2020 wittily points out the irony in contemporary work culture, Final Warfare is charged with sensual energy and intense emotions. A halo of aurora-like green light surrounds the galloping horse, while the female nude falls down onto the soft lush meadow. The painting seems to have captured - or more accurately, invented - a moment from an ancient myth.
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"My work has a lot of playfulness and humor…
… but on the other hand it is pretty matched with the experience we have been through this year." -- Yan Xinyue -
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Yan Xinyue's paintings, rooted in her imagination and reproduction of urban life, blend observation with memory and fiction, and reflect the artist's Proustian way of thinking and the complexity of reality and human emotions. Noteworthy is Yan's highly stylized treatment of edges and background. Fluxes of saturated colors render the image with a psychedelic sense of motion; the subject shades onto the background - lines and edges are blurred using different techniques of brushing, highlighting, overlay and dripping - shrouding the canvas with an obscure and mysterious haze, and taking on an aura unreplicable in the electronic age.
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The three paintings of mutilated motorbikes in the same room depict scenes of dreadful accidents. As the titles of the works suggest, they are indeed heartbreaking still moments due in part to vivid anthropomorphisms of the vehicles. However, like in most of Yan's paintings in the exhibition, tragedy is veiled under a mask of humor and liveliness with vibrant colors, a banana peel, and twinkling sparks as often seen in children's drawings.
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PRESS & MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
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ArtAsiaPacific | What's Up in Shanghai August-September 2020
August 12, 2020It's summer in Shanghai, and while there are still Covid-19 cases being reported, residents are otherwise enjoying their daily lives. Many museums and galleries have staged new exhibitions. Here are... -
Yan Xinyue on Contemporary Art Daily
September 1, 2020 -
Yan Xinyue on Daily Lazy
September 5, 2020
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