[Press Release]

ShanghART is pleased to announce the opening of Hangzhou-based artist, Yuan Yuan’s solo exhibition, “Imagined Memory – A Home From Home 2012 Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Programme” on Nov. 30, 2012. The exhibition will run from Nov. 30, 2012 through Jan. 13, 2013.

A Home From Home is Yuan Yuan’s first solo exhibition at ShanghART Gallery. The oil painter has been exhibited at many art spaces and institutions in China, and has established a style of Realist paintings of often austere, sombre architectural interiors with sophisticated brushstrokes, reinterpreting Classical techniques with modern sensibilities. His work gives off a certain intrigue created by the blurred dichotomy between the real and the psychological, the tactile and the immaterial, the personal and the collectively shared.

The Chinese title of the exhibition, Bin Zhi Ru Gui means “to make your guests feel at home.” Yuan Yuan plays with the nuances between Zhi (to arrive) and Gui (to belong to a place) and explores the peculiarities of “there and not yet there.” To make oneself at home, one recognizes the Other-ness of the self and works to overcome or repress it. Home is the shared experience of living regardless of local or national boundaries. The phrase also implies liberty and ownership. To call a place home, one acts without the impediments of being judged as the Other, and experiences a level of entitlement to the environment. Yuan Yuan’s Realist oil paintings are entitled to the subjects they depict, but are never pompous. The interiors of buildings, factories and distilleries are his private thoughts, invoking feelings of intimacy, meditation and nostalgia. They also seem distant and excavated from memory, as indicated by the sombre colors and brushstrokes that permeate and alter the realist representations. Yuan Yuan has produced an oeuvre that tries to bridge the individual and the collective, and that is materialized in the poetic uncanniness of memory.

From June to August 2012, the artist participated in the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Programme based in Dufftown, Scotland. The exhibition includes all works that were created during the residency and some previous works. Before Yuan Yuan, artists Zhang Qing and Mao Yan from ShanghART have also taken part in the residency.