Look Me in the Eye
2025.05.07 - 2025.05.11
Artist: YAN Bingqing
Curator: Qinru Zhou
Cub_ism_ Artspace is pleased to announce the presentation of YAN Bingqing's first solo project abroad at NADA New York, ‘Look Me in the Eye’ featuring more than a decade of his recent paintings and small-scale clay sculptures. The project will be held from 7th to 11th May 2025.
The gaze begins to linger from the outside world, and in the unconscious gaze, visual perception is established - ‘looking’, an action that seems to be full of initiative, is in essence a passive behaviour. In YAN’s recent creations, redundant pictorial narratives have been omitted, and figures are no longer confined to being portrayed in order to serve a specific atmosphere - the artist faces painting and modelling in a purer state; the simplicity of this focus on ‘painting’ itself also builds a bridge, a path, between what he wants to express and what people see. Thus, when the viewer's eyes meet those of the figures in the paintings, a historical or very different experience is manifested through a certain intuition.
Inheriting the humanist heritage of the Renaissance and the rebellious spirit of Romanticism, YAN Bingqing's ‘portrait’ paintings (where ‘portrait’ is not only the figure, but also ‘hand’, a theme he continues to explore and depict) have always firmly pursued the expression of his own personality. Like the artist himself, his paintings are imbued with Chopin-like restraint and sincerity. The subtle trembling of the figures, the fleeting moments of joy, the subtle tingling and twists under the calm tones of the paintings are all self-analyses of YAN's every present moment; to be precise, the moments framed in the paintings are not the past, but rather, at the point of the gaze, are the eternal encounters between the artist and himself, as follows. “Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment—the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is” (Jorge Luis Borges). These portraits, imbued with nuances of emotion, complement the absence of the physical body through symbolic forms, while deliberately retaining a certain ‘absence’ that creates a deep perceptual connection with the viewer.
YAN Bingqing keep himself in a more relaxed and humorous state in creating clay sculptures- he moulds without preconception, giving each and every one of them, a figure or an animal, the possibility of dynamic gestures, avoiding self-involvement in the work, but letting go of it to let the work take hold of itself. This is also the nature of the clay material: when he kneads with his hands, the surface of the sculpture retains more or less disordered and coarse traces, a perfect incompleteness that mimics the nature of human perception.
YAN’s self-exploration and excavation transforms ‘invisible lived experiences’ into perceptible forms, and when the viewer stops by, his works and the viewer as the subject of viewing enter into a state of ‘entrelacs’, finally completing the construction of a perceptual experience at the meeting of eyes.
“For seeing, I’m born…I gaze the far, I stare at the near…Let it be as it may,Yet it was so fair!"
—Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust Part II