The Texture of Expression

Artists: Ou Ming, Wang Zhiyuan, Yin Changzhi, Yang Guangnan, Yao Hai, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang

Exhibition Dates: July 5th to October 23rd, 2022

Address: Xixian Fengdong Cultural Center, Feng River East Road, Xi’an

The question “what is art?” has long been asked and explored by successive generations of artists. So, when artists ask “what is art?”, what really interests them are new forms and practices that have not yet been fully explored. They seek other possibilities that they can draw upon to expand and enrich what we think of when we think about what art is. Here, six artists, Ou Ming, Wang Zhiyuan, Yin Changzhi, Yang Guangnan, Yao Hai and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, show how, using simple materials in unusual ways, can achieve new perspectives on sculptural form and the composition of a picture or image. 

Ou Ming has been working solely with the medium of plaster to create sculptural forms that come as close as possible to capturing a sense of the essence of life. He describes his works as sculpture that breathe. 

Wang Zhiyuan's works are forged through a direct interaction between the artist and the material. Between the tool and the body, he finds means to evolve his language process in general, and to develop each work individually. 

Yin Changzhi takes the conventions of painting, from the surface plane and the pictorial space to the frame, each of which are disrupted, or “broken” in order to construct compositions as his means of rethinking painting practice. The artworks he creates exist between painting and bas relief sculpture. 

Yang Guangnan’s art is structural, and built upon disparity. Her process reflects how the process of making art according to a purposeful questioning of its basic functions gives renewed understanding of art and life. 

Yao Hai uses a variety of methods such as poured pigment, collage and sewing to achieve sculptural forms. These material languages intersect in his ongoing creations, opening up more dimensions of visual experience in space, colour and form. 

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s textile works thread together evocative shapes and colours that project a labyrinth of feelings, memories, and imagining. The innate softness-meets-tensile strength of the works conjures simple yet powerful feelings of individual life and its complex relationships, of human connections and moods.

Art was ever an arrangement of colour, texture and shapes, in combinations conceived to approximate a sense of space, of form, and of light, natural, real or imagined. In "The Texture of Expression", raw materials are both the substance of the physical artworks as well as the essence of their content. Here, materials are used to achieve structures that are every bit as intriguing as conventional modes of painting or sculpting forms. At times, these might seem more direct for they produce an unusual, surprisingly emotional effect, which is exactly that which art touches within us.