Linguist John Lyons suggests that the safest conclusion is simply to confirm that color "is a product of language informed by culture."
AIKE is delighted to present Wan Yang solo exhibition “From Rainforest To Mars”, consisting of his latest colour series paintings. The exhibition will on view from April 30 to June 5, 2021.
As the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the world in 2020, Wan Yang, like all of us, experienced an unprecedented period of isolation and solitude – both face-to-face communication between people came to a halt, so has contact between man and nature. As Wan Yang hones his techniques and matures in sophistication, “From Rainforest To Mars” was born in this context. During months of voluntary quarantine, Wan Yang, eager to be part of the natural environment urged him to seek solace in collecting white noise from digital recordings. These sounds range from birds chirping and apes howling, to those found in the rainforest, thunders, ocean waves, whale songs, even vibrations of cosmic objects such as Jupiter, Saturn, and Miranda. Many works in this colour series were inspired by such audible environments.
The last but not least work in this exhibition, Mars, drew inspiration from the “Mars Trilogy” by novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. Wan Yang throws himself into implementing thousands of color matrices on the canvas, like mists and ice crystals soaking into a slightly out-of-control picture through a gust of wind. The hard edge flat surfaces in previous works have disappeared entirely in this series, replaced by the logic of vectors and matrices that permeates beneath the surface. Wan Yang uses 3D printing to create several complex and customized painting tools, a kind of container for paint, long before the act of painting begins.
Each work is painted with pigments from a unique palette, like the geological formation of rocks and stones, the colours interspersed inside the palette box, suggest birth and extinction. The layers of colors are interlocked to form a solid framework, and their interplay is quantified precisely by the spatial structure. However, this artificial order becomes increasingly unpredictable and inscrutable in the repeated overlapping mixtures, resulting in complex and subtle, even imperceptible color changes. When a palette box transforms, evolves, and renews in constant re-iterations, when the artist shows the rendering of brushwork and color applications to the extent of reversing speculation of colors in space, it seems colors liberate out of the pictorial space of the canvas.
Floating above the bottom of the paintings are some randomly splashed or deliberately arranged spots, which seems to be the only aspect of Wan Yang’s work that is not constrained or quantified. They appear like floaters in the foreground of the paintings, afford the canvases a brief visual lingering and dynamic observation.
Playful in colour and structure, Wan Yang’s paintings do not convey anything specific except offering clues for perusing the canvas from the work titles. Most of his titles come from or inspired by music records, novels and stories, imagination from structures, color associations, pictures and images, etc. All the information generated by the internal and external environment during the creation process wrestle with one another and eventually integrate verbally into titles for the artworks.
Wan Yang considers his works to be as meaningless as the colours themselves. The completion of artwork is akin to completing an architecture, where a sophisticated self-operating machine gets turned on, and the work of art becomes an independent and external existence. Everyone could interpret it with their feelings, and everyone can understand it in their own way.