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Friday, March 29, 2024


Exhibition Public - USA & Canada

Boundaries of the Spirit

NanHai Art
520 Broadway,
Millbrae, California, USA
Jun 18, 2016 To Jul 23, 2016


Detail: NanHai Art is pleased to present Boundaries of the Spirit, a group show featuring the work of Lin Yan, Zhang Yanzi, and Zhou He, artists whose distinctive practices reveal distinctive artistic personalities. Traces of the subconscious, vague fragments of memory, and the tenuousness of the mind’s hold on the body reach out from the surfaces of their works; powerful psychic forces underlie images that may be exquisitely fragile. From different perspectives, and with different aesthetic vocabularies, the three artists probe the workings of the human spirit with subtlety and elegance, sharing a sensitivity to materials that enables each of them to break conventional expressive boundaries in their paintings, drawings, and installations. 

Lin Yan creates architectural installations and sculpture paintings in xuan paper. In her hands, xuan paper is not merely the submissive medium of painting; rather, it can be shaped to possess weight and layers of its own. Black and white, firmness and softness are harmoniously juxtaposed; each quality implicates the other, like the constant negotiation of void and fullness in tai chi, or the yin-yang balance in traditional Chinese philosophy. Interested in spatial and architectural forms, Lin has created many large site-specific installations. These works sustain the subtle contrast between their massive appearance and light weight.

Zhang Yanzi was born in the Zhenjiang, a town of many islands in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Zhang refers to the vapor of the river and evening breeze in her childhood as an endowment, a quality she imbues into her paintings, which explore ideas of femininity and aesthetic grace rooted in a chant in a poem by Li Zhong of the Tang Dynasty: “the sun and moon in the kettle seem to deliberately draw the distance between hearts closer, the mist and clouds in the twilight off the island appear clearly in dreams.”

Inspired by a trip to the United Kingdom over ten years ago, during which she was struck by the blooming daffodils which were “like mystic eyes seeing through a millennium,” Zhou He creates work that deals in shifting qualities of light in attempt to transfer a spirituality to the canvas.

Phone No.: 650 259 2100
Contact Name: Wendy Zhang
Contact Email: [email protected]
Site URL: http://nanhai.com

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