YANGYANG PAN

THE UNVEILING

April 20 - June 2, 2018

Opening Reception

Friday, April 20, 2018 | 6:00 - 8:00 pm

We are pleased to announce THE UNVEILING, a solo exhibition of new works by YANGYANG PAN. This exhibition marks the artist's third solo exhibition with MJFA and will be on view from April 20 - June 14, 2018, with an opening reception on Friday, April 20th from 6:00-8:00 p.m. The public is welcome to attend and meet the artist.

This exhibition presents eleven of Yangyang Pan's new paintings, based on landscape, all created in the past year. Pan’s gorgeous, opulent compositions oscillate between abstraction and representation. Applying expressive gestural brush strokes, her rich palette of colors reveals the contrasts she finds in nature. Working intuitively and spontaneously, Pan's unique fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities continues to inform her artistic vision and output.

Pan’s love of flowers and gardens is central to her work. However, they are a means to an end. For Pan, flowers, gardens, nature are bound up with action painting, and the freedom she finds through artmaking. (She names Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, among others, as influences). Thus, some paintings border on recognizable “pretty” bouquets, while others appear wild, aggressive, and totally abstract. Pan’s ab-ex style is simply a reflection of her personal journey, beginning in traditional Chinese art training from age 6, to her move West, where she was exposed to Western abstraction in depth.

Employing oil paints on mostly raw, large-scaled linen canvases, Pan deftly punctuates the canvas with splotches of thick, textured brushstrokes of varying shapes and colors, layering paint over paint. Through her improvisational method, the amorphous forms emerge as a cohesive whole that extend to the edge of the canvas, as if without measurable boundaries. The vibrant, energetic dark colors are harmoniously balanced by the soft, pastel hues which seem to imbue each painting with an ambient light.

A beautiful illustration can be observed in the painting entitled In Between the Blossom. This work features a bountiful, cornucopia of botanical blooms rendered in a palette of warm tones of yellow, pink, peach, light blue, maroon, and brown. The thick, textured jagged dabs of paint express Pan’s unrestrained romanticism. Her high level of skill is in combining and blending contrasting colors to create this lavish garden landscape of paradise. This sublime painting is an invitation to immerse oneself in a world of color and texture.

To Pan, the building of the canvas represents a captured moment- a reflection of her personal, emotional landscape- which is reinforced with titles such as Perpetual Bliss, High & Low, and On A Quest. As she states “When the layers overlap again and again, the painting becomes the unity of the interlock of the space and time from my various ideas, eventually they become a record of their own making.”

Born in 1976, Yangyang Pan studied at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute where she received her Honours Bachelor of Arts in 1998 followed by her Master of Fine Art in 2002. She remained as an instructor until 2006 when she relocated to Canada. Since 2006, Pan has exhibited internationally, including Canada, USA, Italy and China. Her work is widely collected in numerous private and public institutions such as Government of Ontario Art Collection, Apple (USA), The Rochester Museum of Fine Art (USA), The Sichuan Fine Art Institute (China) and retail giants including Holt Renfrew (Canada) and Anthropologie (USA).

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For more information and images, contact Madelyn Jordon

T: 914-723-8738 | E: info@madelynjordonfineart.com

Gallery Hours: Tue. - Sat. | 10 am - 5:30 pm

Yangyang Pan: ‘The Unveiling,’ at Madelyn Jordon Fine Art

Yangyang Pan, who was born in 1976, spent the first 30 years of her life in Central China where the meanderings of the Yangtze River, traditional Chinese art and art education shaped her thinking. She even taught art where she studied, at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute, but never realized her full potential as a painter until she moved west to Canada in 2006. At that time, Pan quickly found new inspiration in the work of Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston, opening up her eyes, mind and emotions through the freedom of Abstract Expressionism.

When one arrives late to the approach of the Abstract Expressionist it is difficult to find a fresh path. However, Pan’s personal journey through traditional Chinese painting and her memory of the changing seasons in China, especially spring, brings her to where she is today – an exceptional instinctive and expressive painter.

In her paintings here, which are for the most part inspired by floral gardens, Pan reveals a highly sensitive understanding of the vitality of nature. And, despite the fact that Pan works in multiple layers of increasingly thicker and thicker paint applications she manages to maintain an airiness, a lightless, a weightlessness to her representations of shapes and colors that end up being quite buoyant and uplifting. Pan even suggests this in one of her titles, In Between the Blossoms (2018), a painting that is anchored by an earthen base that propels a distinct vertical movement within a square picture plane. In addition, the fracturing of the forms depicted in this instance is a nod to Cubism, as if Pan is asking us to enter the painting passing through the vagaries of limitless space as we bounce from one angle or vantage point to another.

Be the Good (2018) has a very different feel. Like On a Quest (2018), it has the suggestion of lateral movement, as if we are experiencing the light, color and forms of nature’s spring bounty peripherally. This is important since springtime brings us renewal, even though we may take it for granted, and Pan is reminding us how it unconsciously feeds our soul. Spring is a time when there is a transitioning from the somber grays and browns to enlivening color, when the natural environment starts to come alive again and hope is renewed. Sure, it’s a cliché for sure, but we still feel it, even amongst the most hardened and sour souls.

Dream Land (2018) is aptly named as it has the most Surreal feel of all the paintings here with its twisting pinks and pastel greens and blues that lead to its magical depth. In Perpetual Bliss (2017-18) you can see a link to De Kooning’s Woman I(1950-52), while in Whispering Wind (2018) there’s that deconstructed space akin to a late Cezanne landscape or townscape. Similarly, in Inspired Bright (2017-18), there’s a very strange way the composition vacillates between representation and abstraction – something like a waking dream – as that distinct slice of blue sky and clouds in the top right quickly makes way to transitions in space that are rapid and unpredictable.

By D. Dominick Lombardi, Contributing Editor at Artes Magazine