Taste is subjective, but the human experience is irrepressible. It’s this psychological framework that artist Xinan Yang seemed to tap into with her The First Letter Home in Spring show, which ran earlier this year. Her practice visually centres on formative moments of youth, from which symbols erupt both to disturb as well as comfort.
Emotive works depict a video call with a patient and a visit with the same bed-bound relative, heavy with distance as even once depicted in the room the figures do not face each other. This series features Xinan Yang’s most refined and careful recording, whilst there remains some naivety in the rounded proportions of Yang’s laptop on the bed. Technology depicted in brushstrokes is a trend in recent years, as modern artists record and reflect on the presence of these objects in our lives. It seeps into familial settings.
Haunting yet familiar, Yang’s The Screens Between Us too experiments with framing that unsettles. The painted canvas is implied to be a screen through composition or with denoted elements like painted familiar digital buttons or emojis. This repeated pulse of phones and devices crowds the curated works, a psychological presence and non-presence that ties the user up in solitude despite perceived connection.
There’s a thread of the unconventional through her paintings too that verges on paradoxical. Yang’s willingness to borrow from Disney to Chaplin to Van Gogh is unexpected. There’s a levelling, equalising force in that. Interested in magical realism, Yang’s collaged references bring together a disturbing imagination that allows a colossal fluffy dog to trample through London’s crowded monuments or poetic miniature cranes take flight in a small bedroom. The painting’s worlds do away with logic.
To some extent, Yang’s works also put into question what is deemed as pure and unmixable, why can’t Charlie Chaplin dance in black and white on a neon sunrise for a modern audience? It’s a youthful mentality to add any cultural object to another that produces a hallucinatory effect. Hung on the wall directly to the right of Chaplin a gruff nude man wears a creamy white facemask and a bunch of roses over his genitals, once displayed on a dating app profile, a place full of transient imagery, now forever immortalised on canvas. Perhaps this is an imagined scene, or perhaps not. The artist mirrors the unexpected sequencing of social media or a phone’s camera roll, un-precious and equalising.
Xinan Yang’s palette cycles from psychedelic brights to pastel to monochrome. There’s a sort of whiplash in this bold reimagination of the thing. A bed takes on multiple tones. Her series implies motion. It marks the work out as truly a response to surroundings and conditions rather than a trace or literal snapshot, Yang’s work is interpretative. Spleen lurks, so does palpable darkness. Crowded spaces punctuate the empty ones, like a neon void corridor that could lead to a doctor’s waiting room in conversation with a full tube ride. Inspiration is everywhere and nowhere.
