Yan Xinyue: Summer Mist: Virtual Tour of the Exhibition

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.

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.

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.