YAN XING

Yan Xing is known as one of the most eye-catching emerging artists in the Chinese contemporary art scene, with multi-layered ‘projects’ encapsulating media such as performance, video, photography and installation. Through abundantly intensive study of art history, the artist has attained an artistic narrative with its own logic. Art history is always partly abstracted, reconstructed and generated under the artist’s ‘unique system of integration’, which updates our definition of art and our power to distinguish between artists.

Dirty Art (2013) provides audiences with a grand visual buffet, and draws inspiration from Edward Hopper’s (1882—1967) iconic painting Drug Store (1927). The pharmacy-like construction displays 9 monitors playing videos related to the Chinese expression for Diarrhea—‘Xie’, embodying the artist’s understanding of re-interpretation. In Lenin in 1918 (2013), which encompasses a variety of media, the artist embarks on his most challenging artistic exploration ever. The artist draws on his original abstraction of art history in combination with a mastery of reconstruction, rearrangement and reshaping to create an obscure period of history that in fact never existed. Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces, and American art (2013), unfolded by several striking b/w photographs extoling acts of ‘violence’ and ‘sex’, ‘capture’ and ‘enslavement’, reveals the artist’s endeavor towards multi-layered artistic narrative. This work also shares his own understanding of the United States—‘the core theme of contemporary art’ in his eyes in the very strict sense.