FANG YUAN: LIMINALITIES
Artist: FANG YUAN
Curator: YINGXI LUCY GONG
Exhibition on View:
July 24 - August 17, 2019
Opening Reception:
July 24, 2019
6 - 8 PM
Location:
SOJOURNER GALLERY
178 Bleecker Street 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012
Hours:
Saturday-Sunday 11 am-6 pm,
or by appointment via NewYork@sojournergallery.com
Sojourner Gallery is pleased to announce Liminalities, a solo exhibition of New York-based artist Yuan Fang, featuring her newest body of paintings completed over the last two years. Capturing the in-between movements existing in our surroundings, Fang's artistic practice is nurtured from her experience of living while keeping a distance from both Western and Eastern regions.
Fang's works span across various themes, inviting viewers to picture themselves in a fictitious space. For instance, in Soaking, Detaching (2019), morphed shapes of various muted colors float in a subtle space, where three-dimensionality and depth are suggested, and yet an organic ambiguity dominates. Unlike the loose composition and demure palette of Soaking, Detaching, Burning Ears (2019) presents much more compact and descriptive imagery. With swirling, distorted forms that seem to be merging into and yet departing from each other simultaneously, the painting seems to suggest a human face, or an infinitely morphing mask within the lava-like surface.
Yuan Fang’s painting serves as an extension of her observation, remembrance, detachment from, and ultimately, reconciliation between different realities: past and future, East and West, which boundaries are fundamentally arbitrary and frictional. Her artistic practice has been informed by her upbringing in Shenzhen, a modern city in southern China with almost no historical heritage, but she went through drastic economic development from a small village to an international city within 30 years. Spending her adulthood in the U.S., Yuan Fang further experienced an earthquake in her understanding and consciousness of culture and identity. Her paintings on display in the exhibition, with either exhilarating turmoil or ambivalent serenity, exemplify such liminal status.
Curated by Yingxi Lucy Gong, the exhibition will be on view from July 24 - August 17, 2019, with an opening reception on Wednesday, July 24, 6 - 8 pm. Please join us in celebrating Yuan Fang's first solo exhibition in New York. For additional information or sales inquiries, please contact newyork@timeartsus.com.
Yuan Fang (b. 1996, Shenzhen, China) is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Visual and Critical Studies Program at the School of Visual Arts (BFA) with the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her digital works and paintings have been exhibited in the United States and China, including Cross-Cultural Practice: Recent Works by Chinese Artists in New York, 285 Jay Street, Brooklyn (2019); Surface 8 at ARENA, Brooklyn Dermatology, Brooklyn (2019); Artificial Boundary, Fou Gallery, Brooklyn (2018) and TWO EASTS: Chinese Photographers in America, 103 Allen St. Gallery, New York (2016). Liminalities is her first solo exhibition in New York City.
Yingxi Lucy Gong received her B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College and M.A. in Art History from UMass Amherst. She has curated exhibitions of diverse themes at various museums and galleries, from Japanese modern woodcuts to global ceramic culture. Yingxi currently manages a post-war and contemporary art gallery in New York.
