On January 31, Yin Zhaoyang's solo exhibition "A Vast History" will open at the Long Museum (West Bund). The exhibition features more than forty works spanning oil paintings, ink on paper, prints and sculptures, mostly composed of new works created recently. A series of landscapes and internalized psychological works mainly created in the past three years will be newly presented in the open space of the Long Museum (West Bund). It is a brief summary from 2015 to 2020, and signifies the dawn of a new phase of the artist's personalized creation.
Entitled "A Vast History", the exhibition showcases the boldness and courage of Yin Zhaoyang, one of the representative artists of the post-1970s generation. In the past decade, the artist has decided to depart from his "figure" and "figurative" series, on which he has made his name. In the company of the sun and the moon, the mountains and the rivers, he immerses his body in the nature and treats it as a detector in the mountains standing between the heaven and the earth. He has been struggling in the fight between the most Western creative language and the most oriental traditional landscapes, striving to explore a new way out. Following seven consecutive exhibitions in the name of "Mountains" in the past decade, the artist extends his vision to the infinite, searching for new life in the vast space and time constituted by history and the universe. At the age of fifty, knowing his fate is predecided, he uses a series of concrete landscapes of mountains, rocks, trees and creatures to constitute a vast picture of history, to express the status quo of existence and bury the clues for the future.
This exhibition is particularly notable for the several monumental works of 7-odd meters in length to start a dialogue with the open space of the Long Museum (West Bund). It well demonstrates the artist's great and proud ability to control the space of the scene, and presents the majestic landscapes in images as well. It is a double rein of the space and psychology and also a repeated verification of the "effective range" of the artist’s creation. The eponymous work A Vast History-A Polar Day is the artist's latest experiment in juxtaposing group portraits and landscapes in recent years, and a pioneering work that breaks through the limits of natural landscapes. In this massive work, which has been prepared for two years, the figures have witnessed the blooming of a new universe in a flash, the fantasy and movement caused by the vortex, displaying a fascinating allure and symbolizing the brightness of the future.
If monumental works are an expression of strength and even power, the elaborated presentation of small sized works and the fusion of multi-media and materials in this exhibition, demonstrate Yin’s multi-faceted language and the unity of his personal style with it. On the one hand, the multifaceted language and dimension have formed the “controlled” rhythm in the artist's creation, which creates rich layers of breathing for the whole exhibition. On the other hand, among various media, the artist has synchronized his personal temperament in the works. In the printmaking which is Yin’s background, his attempts to follow the predecessors in experimenting on ink, and his sculptural creation of deconstruction and reorganization, we could universally identify a temperament, spirit and sense of mission belonging exclusively to the post-70s generation of Chinese artists in his works. What are vaguely visible are the desire to expand boundaries, the revolutionary spirit of continuous optimism, brutal dismantling and empowering reassembly.
The exhibition will run until March 28. Please stay tuned.
January 31, 2021