Art Journal #44: Yan Pei Ming @ UCCA

I am surprised to see that Yan Pei Ming has broken off so well from his traditional canvas work. Its rare that an artist of his age is still experimenting, and to such great effect. Definitely not true for the so called F4 (Zhang Xiaogang etc), which has no new interesting works since like 10 years ago. While I love Xu Bing to death, he hasnt done new works as impactful (though the Iron Phoenix is quite ambitious and can be really nice - just havent seen it).

In his first major installation, called "Landscape of Childhood", Yan painted 34 children, the sick and the orphaned, on flags flying before a big backdrop of landscape. The exceedingly loud noise from the fans to keep the flags up was apparently not intentional - and the colors on the painted flags were said to be fading already due to the strong gust. But for audience, the noise was absolutely a part of the installation, and added to the impact. You felt the fragility, helplessness of the children against the strangely sparse background of Western-looking landscape as you look at the oversized portraits. It's bold to fill such a big room with "so little". But it was well done!

Wonder how its going to work this time - I read that the 400k USD to set up Qiu Zhijie's last UCCA exhibition was paid for not by UCCA, but by some gallery. Presumbly the work will be sold off in pieces. Same for this Yan's exhibition I guess - there's 34 pieces to sell this time?!