Yuz Museum Shanghai will present the first series exhibitions for the Yuz Museum Project Room in September 2015. This ongoing project invites artists to make site-specific works or projects, engaging boldly with the museum, its surroundings and its audience, focusing on the present and development of contemporary art, and exploring possibilities in contemporary art.
Commissioned by Yuz Museum, the artist Huang Yuxing will create his artwork based on the space of the museum’s new Project Room. After eight months creating on a 3 x 10.5 meter canvas without preconceived ideas of theme or style, Huang Yuxing will unveil his project on Aug. 27th, 2015.
The title Liquidus in this exhibition derives from the scientific term for the temperature at which substances begin to freely flow as liquids. The substances in the paintings melt and hover in the weightless space. The bubbles seem like blood, water drops, emulsions, metals, and synthetic chemicals stacking across the canvas. This series of works, which Huang Yuxing describes as “bubbles,” was born out of the ideas “rivers” and “eddies,” in which the artist has been immersed for a long time. Bubbles in a rushing river, bubbles from churning eddies, and bubbles rising from the bottom of riverbed are all expressed as the excitement and jubilation of newly fluid substances. The “bubbles” are about vanishment; their momentary existence is always facing eternity. Starting from a micro-perspective, the work embodies the life experience of an individual human being in the world of substance.
This large artwork was created without a sketch or study. In his approach to painting, Huang Yuxing begins by dividing the canvas by long and straight lines. Through many thin layers of paint, he lets the bubbles and liquid drops of all sizes, textures and colors form randomly and grow freely in the space. He applies a large amount of symbolized transparent pure color on the canvas to establish the weightless substantive world. As the title of the exhibition Liquidus demonstrates, the artist endows the substance with the essential temperature to make the whole world erupt in “revelry.”
The creative features that Huang Yuxing pursues are the experience and expressionism of painting. Thus, he is always faithful to the life experience of the individual. He emphasizes the self-consciousness of painting and uses various visual approaches to express his inner feelings. In his early works, the relation between “human beings” and “nature” were a very crucial theme and thread. The things he painted, such as black bodies, scattered organs and dim scenes, expressed the artist’s strong emotional strength in an extremely intimate language. In the past five years, new subject matter that formed through lengthy accumulation, such as rivers, woods, bubbles, and treasure, show how the artist responds to the macroscopic world. His creation changes linearly, lying between reality and abstraction, joy and depression, and wandering at the edge of different dimensions of the world.
About the artist
Huang Yuxing was born in 1975 in Beijing. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts Mural Department in 2000, and currently lives and works in Beijing. His major exhibitions include: The River’s Gobbled up Trees and He’ll Swallow You Next (Antenna Space, Shanghai, China, 2014); Flame and the Sea: Gao Weigang, Huang Yuxing and Ouyang Chun (Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong, China, 2013); Le cours d’un fleuve (Galerie Paul Frèches, Paris, France, 2013); Huang Yuxing (Beijing Commune, Beijing, China, 2012); Jardin des révolutionnaires (Galerie Paul Frèches, Paris, France, 2012); Light—Huang Yuxing’s Drawing Exhibition (Star Gallery, Beijing, China/Red Bridge Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2010); Looking for Me (Minsheng Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, 2008); and Hole (Star Gallery, Beijing, China, 2007).
About Yuz Project Room
Yuz Project Room is a new independent exhibition program at the Yuz Museum which opens to the public in September 2015. Yuz Project Room invites artists to make site-specific works or projects, engaging boldly with the museum, its surroundings and its audience. Combining “project + exhibition,” the artist interacts actively with the space and aims to present the moment when contemporary art occurs.
Yuz Project Room is the place where innovation, invention, and new movements happen in the trajectory of an artist. It aims to provide another platform for Chinese and international artists to exhibit their artworks as well as more opportunities to communicate with each other. Yuz Project Room invites the artist to get inspired with new ideas by engaging with the museum space and attempting to create breakthrough artworks that diverge from the artist’s accustomed path.
