4 Nov. 2023 - 10 Dec. 2023
JIN YANAN: LAWN(100M) ZHAI YUHUI: WASTELAND
JIN YANAN: LAWN(100M) ZHAI YUHUI: WASTELAND
Artists: Jin Yanan,Zhai Yuhui
Duration:4 Nov. 2023 - 10 Dec. 2023
Opening: 4pm, 4 Nov. (Sat.), 2023
The grassland remains the same. Once green grass withers and fades, tender shoots promptly emerge, going through seasons of growth and decline. The exhibition by Jin Yanan and Zhai Yuhui captures the withering and renewal within the familiarity of everyday things, drawing inspiration from the grassland.
Everyday objects serve as the primary focus of Zhai Yuhui's work, liberated from their customary order through material and form transformations, creating new narrative structures. In this exhibition, the crow from nature and common boxes from daily life take center stage. Boxes are stacked in a tower-like structure with different orientations. The leaden bodies of the boxes suppress the tower's fluctuating state, creating a stable yet temporary composition. The Crow stands atop the lead tower, opening up another sensory world that oscillates between unity and separation, heaviness and lightness, withering and renewal.
Simulated flowers, plastic figures, and a multitude of simulacra replacing reality blur the boundaries between the virtual and the real, making it difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Jin Yanan uses this simulation as a clue to reconstruct the image of a garden. In their investigation of the insurance industry, the artist discovered that garden imagery is widely used in insurance advertisements. Insurance money, as a symbol of exchange, conveys not only emotional relationships between individuals but also reflects human awareness of the finiteness of life and the continuity of the unknown future. The symbol of the beautiful garden, after being extensively appropriated, paradoxically becomes associated with people's expectations of death. Perhaps it's an imperceptible entanglement? There was originally a pipe in the grassland, which the artist bound one by one with green ties of varying shades, forming a new pipe. This binding relationship also creates a new grassland. The real grassland, the simulated invaded grassland, the beautiful garden, and the associated expectation of death.
Jin Yanan, born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang in 1986, Jin Yanan obtained a master's degree in Sculpture from the China Academy of Art in 2012. Since 2013, he has been teaching at the China Academy of Art's Department of Sculpture in the Cross-border Sculpture Studio. He currently lives and works in Hangzhou.Jin Yanan is interested in dialogic relationships within specific contexts. In the past, he explored the balance between individuals and collectives by participating in art groups or collaborative creative endeavors. He later ventured into public projects, investigating the negotiation failures caused by misaligned logics among different levels in community design and urban planning. In recent years, he has focused on the differentiated expressions of individual or collective units within collaborative mechanisms. He strengthens the possibilities of dialogue between units and their mutual aggressiveness by constructing metaphorical designs aimed at the system.Currently, this type of design is presented in part through the narrative clues and spatial design of his works and in part through long-term project planning.
Zhai Yuhui, born in Henan in 1996, Zhai Yuhui currently lives and works in Hangzhou. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of the School of Fine Arts at Southwest University in 2020, earning a bachelor's degree. In the same year, he was admitted to the Cross-border Sculpture Studio at the China Academy of Art and obtained his master's degree in 2023. In 2021, he became a member of the Copper Field Tproject, and the distinctive characteristics of the space's live scene work also inspired him. Today, his work presents a unique structural state that conveys the metaphor of materials, working methods, and imagery, ultimately forming a material structure parallel to reality. Through this approach, he addresses a wide range of societal issues.