Mimmo Scognamiglio Gallery is pleased to present Parallelo Oriente/Occidente, a two-person exhibition that sees Chinese artist Yuxiang Wang and Iranian artist Leila Mirzakhani interacting for the first time in the same exhibition spaces with their most recent productions.
Emerging artist Yuxiang Wang has always paid close attention to the places and spaces with which he relates to the point of achieving an alignment between the artistic tradition of his places of origin and the cultural environment under consideration. Similarly, the young artist Leila Mirzakhani finds a balance between the spiritual dimension of her homeland and the intimate relationship she finds within nature. Although the two artists come from distant dimensions, one from the East and the other from the Middle East, they blatantly bring out common needs and desires that flow into a hybridisation with Western culture.
Through a more poetic and reflective approach Mirzakhani brings back with different techniques, from watercolour on paper to glazed ceramics, instinctive studies on world of the natural conveying its more placid dimension of ephemeral atmospheres and colours inspired by the seasons. The Iranian artist minimises the pictorial sign to bring out the spontaneous trace of the organic and material components with which she makes her canvas interact, offering an example of instinctive practice that outlines the impermanence of nature.
A harmonious and subtle beauty that meets the stylistic canons of artist Yuxiang Wang, who instead uses rock, wood, ceramic, and steel to rethink the relationship between humans and the urban environment. Yuxiang's practice is rooted between architectural and public space and seeks to reflect the artist's intimate experience in contact with a population and the places that best represent it. The deconstruction and reconstruction of objects that are symbolic of a culture are a way for the Chinese artist to appropriate and give back his own version of historical and cultural mechanisms unknown to him. Objects that represent an environment and that decontextualised and related to other elements take on new narrative value.
In the central room of the gallery, one realises how the representation of the cage led the two artists, so different and distant in tradition, to reason about similar themes. The dramatic act of enclosing someone or something in a cage is seen by both as a metaphor for the possible dangers that the conditions of freedom of thought can suffer while simultaneously observing the spatial limit as a possibility outside of it.
Press release courtesy Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea.
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