In Between Days

The numbing song of cicadas that echoes through the city is the season's call for Art+ Shanghai Gallery's annual summer exhibition series In Between Days. Hot midsummer days is the time the gallery strips off the curatorial framework and indulges in an exciting and exploratory spree of colors, shapes, and meanings. The Xth issue of the series presents a creative medley on paper, canvas, wood, and fabric, painted, sculpted, as dsembled, or stitched together. We are excited to present recent works from the gallery artists, including the new Supernova and Enclosure series by Ye Hongxing, enigmatic scapes in natural pigment by Sun Bo, and a two-meter stainless steel sculpture by Huang Yulong. Debuting in the gallery for the first time this season are three new artists Hor Peixuan, Kimyoo Min, and Wang Baoliang.

A visionary world of Ye Hongxing's mind continues to explore the transcendent and pours on canvas the imagery beyond physical reality. Composed of a bewildering miscellany of plastic stickers, her works depart from the trivial and material into spiritual and ethereal. The latest works from Eclosion 羽化 and Supernovas 超新星 series seem to carry an encrypted message for posterity.  Enigmatic, dreamlike metaphysical diagrams with symbolist iconography convey a sense of mystery and all-encompassing knowledge of the Universe.

Sun Bo's creations painted with natural pigment also dwell in the realm of intangible and transcendent. Sparing his creations of the human's artificial world, he encapsulates the quintessence of the natural. Dedicated to collecting rocks and natural materials and preparing pigments himself, the artist allows colors to appear in his work as nature itself intended.  Sun Bo's incredible instinct for the expressive power of color and texture lends his works their outstanding quality.  

Another artist turning to nature for inspiration but in a very personal way is Hor Peixuan. Her works combine naivety in style, and yet intelligence and wisdom in her philosophical take on life. Simple yet meticulous, childlike but sophisticated are her series of watercolors on paper capturing life around the pond of water lilies at nighttime.  

With the romantic title Encounter of Fireflies the series fully realize its creator's intention when properly leveled and positioned in the correct sequence. With a flair of a film director, Hor creates the setting that allows the fireflies to time travel and meet the version of themselves that is one or two hours older. The artist camouflages a clock face in the water lilies pond as a visual clue for the viewers to understand the story. Such a phantasmagoric scenario is meant to draw viewers' attention to their own pace of life, maddened by the workload and ever-present personal issues to solve, they forget to notice the changing scenery around them. The series seems to reveal the artist's perspective and experience of time, space, and life itself.

Korean artist Kim Yoomin employs her artistic practice as a means of expressing and dealing with the intricacies of one’s emotional state. Countless painstakingly thin lines applied one after another in a meditative fashion together weave a thread that coils up in circles or tangles and intertwines. Each line’s direction and the color is  defined by Kimyoo’s emotional state, every new twist and shade is a new emotion that arises, mimicking ever-changing internal dynamics of mind and heart. If a line is considered to be a dot in motion , then for Kim Yoomin the dot is the being and the line is an ever-changing emotional state of this being.

Every detail and means of expression is of importance in her work. In some of the series, YooMin’s artistic expression is enriched with volume and relief is sculpted with clay to emphasize the magnitude of emotions occurring. The wooden panels that Yoomin is using as bases for her works are shaped in irregular circles to compliment the curvilinear shapes in her works.

Wang Baoliang draws inspiration for his sculptures from the ancient Chinese craft of ‘qian ceng di’ 千层底 -  multi-layer cloth sole shoe-making. He creates his sculptures by stacking together layers of old clothing fabric, then cuts and openings are made on the surface of the sculptures to reveal the strenuous and meticulous work accomplished. The act of revealing is done for “subverting people's conventional understanding of the cloth as the material” says Baoliang, where "old has been transformed into the new, soft into the firm and durable, and light into heavy."

Huang Yulong’s sculpture Heaven and Earth portrays his signature figure in a hooded sweatshirt with both hands stretched out and one index finger pointing up in the sky and the other down on the ground. The sculpture summarizes the underlying philosophical principle of duality in Daoism, where a man is positioned in the middle of the two worlds and has to keep a  balance between the two to live in harmony. Yulong's sculpture has no face and yet it is not faceless. It mirrors the faces of the viewers and reflects their truth at them depending on where they find themselves in this world in the moment of looking. 

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