LIAN YUANWEI: Don’t forget to say you love me (2005)
LIANG YUANWEI and YANG JING
Espacio Minimo Gallery opens its 2006-2007 season with the Spanish debut of two young Chinese artists: LIANG YUANWEI and YANG JING, for each of whom this is also their first solo show.
LIANG YUANWEI‘s exhibition is made up of 3 series of works. Don’t forget to say you love me is composed of 4 large-scale photographic self-portraits, produced in 2005, in which the artist shows herself to the camera in the way that what a woman in love should, having taken on her position as object in a man’s world, where her greatest ambition is to be looked at and desired by them.
For 50 pieces of life , a series of paintings made between 2004 and 2005, LIANG YUANWEI collected pieces of cloth belonging to her family, her friends, and mostly herself. The cloth is taken from sheets, clothes, handkerchiefs, or towels that had been used for so long that they brought strong memories of her past. Then she selected the most significant of them and has painted faithful reproductions of them, painting in the signs of the passing of time such as decolouring, small rips and tears, or stains. Each is a life-size 14 x 12 cm section, as if the stretcher had been covered with the real cloth rather that its painted canvas reproduction.
For over a year now the artist has been systematically using her camera to catch varied moments of her daily life. From this the series Somewheresomepage emerges, made up of those snapshots that capture some of the most intimate, personal, and fleeting feelings of each moment. The series also includes paintings which, making use of some of those snapshots, comprise something like a tour through her life, or a memoirs of it, in small fragments.
YANG JING : Watercolour from the “toys” and “games” series
YANG JING‘s work has recently concentrated on the subject of toys and games , and the influence these have on many aspects of our existence. In the current development of China, toys and games have flooded every corner of their inhabitant’s lives with an irresistible power that has rapidly grown like idolatry amongst groups of people that mercilessly abandon themselves to them like faithful devotees of the commercial consumer society. This is particularly significant amongst the young for whom games and toys have formed and integral part of their upbringing.
For this artist the connotations of these two terms have suffered delicate changes in contemporary Chinese society. Be they favourable or damaging, YANG JING has attempted to describe them in her work as entities full of vitality and energy, and makes use of them to express sentimental experiences and delve into the influences, meanings, and connotations that they have in our lives.
LIANG YUANWEI (Xi’An, 1977), is a graduate of the CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts) in Beijing, where she currently teaches. She has been included in other important collective shows: N12 y N12 nº 2 at the Gallery of Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2003 and 2004, in VV2viverevenezia2. Reciclyng the Future in Venice in 2003 and in Naughty Kids: the chinese new generation born after 1970 in 2005 in Beijing.
YANG JING (Beijing, 1976), is a graduate of the CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts) in Beijing and has taken part in distinguished collective shows such as N12 y N12 nº 2 at the Gallery of Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2003 and 2004, The Self-Made Generation. A Retrospective of New Chinese Painting at Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art and Fiction @ Love at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, both in 2006.
Espacio Mínimo Gallery, Madrid. September 14th to October 31st 2006
For more information, go to www.espaciominimo.com
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