I see ......Yang Nai-Jen Solo ExhibitionPost date：2024-12-17
Updates：2024-12-18
107
- Event Time
- 2024-12-21~2025-01-24Tue. - Sat. 11:00-19:00
- Event Location
- 1F., No.2, Alley 45, Lane 147, Sec. 3, Sinyi Rd., Da'an Dist., Taipei City Taiwan, R.O.C
A light gesture that carries so much weight—notes on Nai-jen Yang’s ‘I see……’
by Andrew Pierre Hart (Artist/Lecturer)
‘Feather-light, fluttering and flickering, gentle textures cover the ground as they sway in the wind.’
Nai-Jen’s delicate gestural abstractions quietly ask for time—time to unfold, time for the viewer. A temporal and optical shift occurs when one allows time to enter into Nai-Jen‘s world.The feeling of a gentle breeze against a warmly wrapped body, or the subtle shifts in blades of sun-dried long grass offering soft tones as the breeze activates them, are diaristic approaches that give these fluctuating temporal shifts and engagements in the artist's work such a quietly bold presence.
This is a counteroffer to the fast, visual nature of the saturated palettes in contemporary painting. The temporal shift in this gesture—to take time with painting, take time with looking, and take time with the exchange—becomes an unfolding and revealing of what was once a palette of colors on a canvas. It now reveals multiple worlds for the viewer to gently enter, discover, and explore. They were always invited, but they needed to take their time as they entered the paintings.
Nai-Jen’s paintings begin to reveal something about contemporary painting and viewing. The artist is driven by the process of painting and what exists in that space and time—a poetic listening, a call-and-response between the artist and material, material and process, constantly in dialogue with one another, constantly listening through the temporal space of painting and what the space of the process becomes: windows of abstraction or gently pulsating landscapes. Exploring and traveling, visiting moments and flashes of memory through the making process of her paintings.
Nai-Jen states, “I try to include the ‘behind the scenes’ in my works. By applying different layers of rabbit skin glue to affect the color of the paint on top, the glue for priming becomes the glue for painting.”The substrate becomes material, becomes part of the painted matter—everything is paint, all is painting. Through her explorations and experiments, the ground, whether rabbit skin glue or gesso, becomes paint itself. This offers a nuance in tone and acts as a register of painting material, and this is it—the surface of the substrate becomes the surface of the painting.
‘Glue Study on Muslin (Moonlight)’—a small painting with a shimmer of light across the water, Monet and Turner spring to mind—is the perfected concoction of process, of making and describing the work. Painting about painting. A 360-degree, all-encompassing, and engaging artwork that builds from and out of itself—nature making nature. To stretch , to prime and to paint, something begins to happen. Canvas, rabbit skin glue, wood, paint, these are all natural ingredients, all part of the natural world we exist in. Glue study, a process-driven painting, the title welcomes you to consider the mediums at play and the arrival of the moonlight. Light is as much paint as paint is paint.
Behind the scenes of this private and yet very generous invitation into Nai-Jen’s world are the musical influences on the paintings. The artist sets the tone: “I try to find music that suits the mood or the vibe of the painting.”What lies beneath the surface of these works offers so much more—captured moments, the locked-in emotion of a song. The entire show offers a playlist, and each painting is a song. In the same rhythm as Nai-Jen’s mark-making, a musical encounter happens: a song on repeat, a mark repeated like the gentle sound of the brush on a cymbal. At times, we are locked into the groove, where one song plays on repeat because it’s the only tone, atmosphere, and feeling that the painting can exist in. In each painting and song , a story is being told—yet not everything is a story, the paintings offer an expression of a feeling, a momentary glance, like vignettes inside and outside of a narrative existing in the oeuvre. How it feels when making the painting, is as much part of the wider dialogue and conversation being offered to the audience by the artist.
And further behind the scenes, we return to the early study of Tsun—an Eastern traditional ink painting style where technique is repeated and perfected. A rhythm ensues as the work is made, through each subtle brushstroke which is applied with perfect weight and technique while coming from a pure place of thought. This is part of the technical background of the artist, who reflects on Eastern as well as Western art and the contemporary within the two, all in relation to the canon of abstraction.
by Andrew Pierre Hart (Artist/Lecturer)
‘Feather-light, fluttering and flickering, gentle textures cover the ground as they sway in the wind.’
Nai-Jen’s delicate gestural abstractions quietly ask for time—time to unfold, time for the viewer. A temporal and optical shift occurs when one allows time to enter into Nai-Jen‘s world.The feeling of a gentle breeze against a warmly wrapped body, or the subtle shifts in blades of sun-dried long grass offering soft tones as the breeze activates them, are diaristic approaches that give these fluctuating temporal shifts and engagements in the artist's work such a quietly bold presence.
This is a counteroffer to the fast, visual nature of the saturated palettes in contemporary painting. The temporal shift in this gesture—to take time with painting, take time with looking, and take time with the exchange—becomes an unfolding and revealing of what was once a palette of colors on a canvas. It now reveals multiple worlds for the viewer to gently enter, discover, and explore. They were always invited, but they needed to take their time as they entered the paintings.
Nai-Jen’s paintings begin to reveal something about contemporary painting and viewing. The artist is driven by the process of painting and what exists in that space and time—a poetic listening, a call-and-response between the artist and material, material and process, constantly in dialogue with one another, constantly listening through the temporal space of painting and what the space of the process becomes: windows of abstraction or gently pulsating landscapes. Exploring and traveling, visiting moments and flashes of memory through the making process of her paintings.
Nai-Jen states, “I try to include the ‘behind the scenes’ in my works. By applying different layers of rabbit skin glue to affect the color of the paint on top, the glue for priming becomes the glue for painting.”The substrate becomes material, becomes part of the painted matter—everything is paint, all is painting. Through her explorations and experiments, the ground, whether rabbit skin glue or gesso, becomes paint itself. This offers a nuance in tone and acts as a register of painting material, and this is it—the surface of the substrate becomes the surface of the painting.
‘Glue Study on Muslin (Moonlight)’—a small painting with a shimmer of light across the water, Monet and Turner spring to mind—is the perfected concoction of process, of making and describing the work. Painting about painting. A 360-degree, all-encompassing, and engaging artwork that builds from and out of itself—nature making nature. To stretch , to prime and to paint, something begins to happen. Canvas, rabbit skin glue, wood, paint, these are all natural ingredients, all part of the natural world we exist in. Glue study, a process-driven painting, the title welcomes you to consider the mediums at play and the arrival of the moonlight. Light is as much paint as paint is paint.
Behind the scenes of this private and yet very generous invitation into Nai-Jen’s world are the musical influences on the paintings. The artist sets the tone: “I try to find music that suits the mood or the vibe of the painting.”What lies beneath the surface of these works offers so much more—captured moments, the locked-in emotion of a song. The entire show offers a playlist, and each painting is a song. In the same rhythm as Nai-Jen’s mark-making, a musical encounter happens: a song on repeat, a mark repeated like the gentle sound of the brush on a cymbal. At times, we are locked into the groove, where one song plays on repeat because it’s the only tone, atmosphere, and feeling that the painting can exist in. In each painting and song , a story is being told—yet not everything is a story, the paintings offer an expression of a feeling, a momentary glance, like vignettes inside and outside of a narrative existing in the oeuvre. How it feels when making the painting, is as much part of the wider dialogue and conversation being offered to the audience by the artist.
And further behind the scenes, we return to the early study of Tsun—an Eastern traditional ink painting style where technique is repeated and perfected. A rhythm ensues as the work is made, through each subtle brushstroke which is applied with perfect weight and technique while coming from a pure place of thought. This is part of the technical background of the artist, who reflects on Eastern as well as Western art and the contemporary within the two, all in relation to the canon of abstraction.
