randian | 燃点

［Press Release]

Yang Mian’s solo exhibition “Yang Mian 2016” will be opened on June 25th at A Thousand Plateaus Art Space. It will exhibit some important art works of the “CMYK series”, including his representative huge piece “CMYK – The Murals in Yongle Palace”, which will be revealed in Chengdu for the first time, and Yang Mian’s latest series focusing on experimental painting materials will be presented as well.

In his early well-known “Beauty Standard” series, through diverting and reconstructing pop image, Yang Mian questioned the security of images and moved forward to the discussion and study of image dissemination. Beginning with the “CMYK” series in 2008, Yang Mian has accessed classical images among art history as the object of image diverting and made his experimental method a kind of graphical text establishment full of cultural reconstruction sense. “CMYK” color mode is widely used in today’s printing industrial technique. All complex images are emerged in the composition of “C”(cyan), “M”(magenta), “Y”(yellow), “K”(black). The artist downloaded the classic paintings from the internet and enlarged them to find the distribution and the arrangement of the four colors, then got an independent new picture by reducing the density of the color arrangement. The artist believes that no matter how complex and mysterious the details of the classic works are, the main character is still “CMYK” and it decides their appearance and attractiveness in the way of spreading. Since a series of works constructed by pure and enlarged “CMYK” structure have presented to us, the following images and results will change our existed understanding and thoughts to images.

Yang Mian transferred “CMYK” from the fast and easy industrial printing to complex, low-efficient handmade works with industrial style, which seems like a kind of linguistic code with the artist’s personal imprint. This re-coding process rejected social and political meaning of images, dispelled the usual delivering process of images, in order to make the artworks exist between the edges of abstract visual sense with the whole image perception. In such an age with images flooding, these works are not only questioning the traditional watching interest but also persuading the audience to re-evaluate the new relationship between contemporary painting and image in an extreme contemporary way.