On January 17, 2015, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space will open the first exhibition of the new year with Xiong Yu’s most recent work series Blue Forest. As a mature artist who is constantly challenging himself and exploring in great depth painting, Xiong Yu always preserves a well-disciplined attitude and the spirit of initiative. A Thousand Plateaus Art Space have always focused on the post-1970s artists as the hard core in China’s contemporary art scene. Xiong Yu’s creation presents a consistent context and an ever-rising level, it has become an important sample in understanding the development new painting. His solo exhibition collects work from the new series in 2014, and welcomes a fresh outlook.
His paintings have always used representations in a large-eyed cartoon style to show both the childlike purity and imagination of his inner world and the joy, sadness and confusion that he has faced as an adult. In this new group of works, it’s weakened and has largely gone. Except for the theme, the greatest change also happens in the background and texture. In the new contexts, Xiong Yu introduces a painting skill similar to prints and a flattening decorating texture to make the works discolored and the sense of time highlighted. The theme Blue Forest doesn’t only depict an inner world full of imagination and thoughts, but also comes from the entangled and charming interaction between brush and vision.
In a solo exhibition at A Thousand Plateaus that was held two years ago, Xiong Yu employed forms from classical European painting, particularly their compositions. He was searching for instances in which a new framework would reveal a greater feeling of depth and commonality in the works. These works were clearly influenced by dramatic lyrical structure. In this new group of works, he carries out different attempts to exceed the classical framework and begins to seek a breakthrough in a more direct visual structure. In his most recent works, direct brushwork integrates with these effects in order to give the works a deeper level of meaning. Thus he constantly connects the viewers’ vision and emotion, resonating with them. As a result, Xiong Yu’s works and emotion become unprecedentedly authentic.
This effect appears to a great extent in the triptych New Work. It expands a space full of conception. All the three parts are composed of the branches in close shot, water in medium shot and woods in long shot. Through the color contrast, the closed things seem far, while the the really far things seem more real; he deliberately stagger the three images. The spaces don’t seem unified at first sight, however, they are unified with the scattered visions. They compose an nonobjective image. In fact instead of the scenery, it’s the artist’s inner world that is represented in vision. This may be the beginning of a bold new series in which the artist abandons his graphic style. For an artist who already has a mature image, this kind of attempt always requires a great amount of courage, but it is worth the wait.
