Minimal | Maximal : 

New Works by David Kimball Anderson & Yangyang Pan

April 30 – June 11, 2022

Statement

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is delighted to present Minimal|Maximal, a dual exhibition featuring works by David Kimball Anderson and Yangyang Pan. The exhibition explores the essence of flowers through Anderson and Pan’s contrasting styles. Debuting new sculptures and paintings.

Press Release

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is delighted to present Minimal|Maximal, a dual exhibition featuring works by David Kimball Anderson and Yangyang Pan. The exhibition will run from April 30 – June 11, 2022. The opening reception will be on Saturday, April 30 from 1:00-5:00pm.

The exhibition explores the essence of flowers through David Kimball Anderson and Yangyang Pan’s contrasting styles. Debuting new sculptures and paintings by the two artists, Minimal|Maximal presents juxtaposed interpretations of floral compositions. 

Anderson’s minimalist approach can be likened to the Japanese art of Ikebana, designing flower arrangements to reflect harmony and balance between opposing elements. Elegantly simple in form and function, Anderson’s sculptures harness the Zen beauty of the natural world. 

Throughout his forty-five-year career, Anderson’s sculpture has been described as “a contemplation on the meaning of things that give beauty and pleasure.” His life-sized, three-dimensional floral still life pieces, constructed in bronze, steel and paint, are diverse in color, shape, and species, depicting flowers, branches and seeds growing in his garden, from columbine to crocus. Contained in bronze molds of Asian antique bottles and vessels sourced from the artist’s personal collection, the sculptures can incorporate spheres configured to seasonal, astronomical transits, or man-made detritus found on daily walks. For example, in Planets, Seeds, Nasturtium, a large, found metal disc plays an unexpected role in a composition of painted flowers, seeds, and intertwined branches, sitting in a graceful, grey patinaed vase. These still-life constructions reinforce Anderson’s life-long pursuit to find beauty in all things, and merge his spiritual practice in nature-based artwork.
Conversely, Yangyang Pan’s maximal approach radiates across her canvases in floral bursts. Her flower arrangements become supernatural as large gestural brushstrokes whirl together in beautifully chaotic bouquets of saturated color. Pan is widely recognized for her gestural abstract paintings primarily focused on the contrasts found in nature. Her expressive visual language takes inspiration from her physical surroundings and personal memories, fusing it with spirit and spontaneity sourced from emotions within. 

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. 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.

Epiphany

Solo Exhibition at Elora Centre of the Arts

June 17th to August 1st, 2021

  • Yangyang Pan: Artist Statement 
  • Coming from away, I unpack my paint box to interpret the Canadian landscape from a different perspective. I tame the wilderness and make my gardens wild. With a bird’s eye view of the new, yet old earth around me, I challenge the Canadian Shield and honour the St. Lawrence Lowlands. It is an immigrant immersion. I learn the land and present its messages. The abstracted landscape lets me step into it gently, then build, with my brushstrokes, this new embrace to a release. I paint my way into a new space that does not contain me. It allows me to feel an unfamiliar freedom and, at the same time, to be myself.
  • My focus is on chromatic lyricism. My paintings, with their exuberance and wild colours, develop and evolve as an intuitive reaction to my beautiful surroundings, whether as close as the garden or farther throughout the region. The resulting work is an interplay of my memories and my present, as I bring together the ethereal and the physicality of the land around me. Perhaps this distillation of nostalgia helps me to understand the here and now.
  • What I wish to present is my journey. While ostensibly based on the dynamic visual forces of nature, landscape and surroundings, these lyrical works are as much a landscape of my inner emotions, memories and history. I want my paintings to pulse with life and reveal a marriage of my cultural connections and ideas of aesthetics. This work allows me to consider the space between seen and unseen, which takes root in one’s senses and memory. I aim for the beauty and drama of evocative abstract painting within an ongoing exploration of what can be achieved in paint. I try to push the relation between form and colour to create a visual sensation of energy, emotion, and reality: epiphany.
  • My ‘Ephiphany’ solo exhibition at the Elora Centre for the Arts includes my recent work in the past three years. I try to capture the energy flow and the senses, and the fusion of eastern and western traditions. I grew up in China, where I got my art education. While much of my influence comes from Chinese culture and arts, I am also influenced by western abstract expressionism painters like Willem De Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston and Cy Twombly, among others. My work reflects the blend of ideas between east and west, and is emblematic of the global nature of art.

YANGYANG PAN: 

VISIONS OF EDENSeptember 11 – October 31, 2020

Press Release

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to announce YANGYANG PAN: VISIONS OF EDEN, a solo exhibition of new works by Chinese/Canadian artist YANGYANG PAN. This exhibition marks the artist's fifth solo exhibition with MJFA and will be on view from September 11 - October 24, 2020. The official opening is Saturday, September 12, 2020 from 10:00 am - 5:00 pm. 

VISIONS OF EDEN takes a more pointed approach to the abstract landscapes that have defined Pan’s practice for the past 10 years. In the 12 oil paintings on canvas and linen presented, Pan reveals her inner self to radiate moods, emotional states, and thoughts on painting. Her works of intense chromatic lyricism are vibrant and visionary, informed by the artist’s deep-seated knowledge of Eastern and Western art history. 

Inspiration for this series comes from a poem by 5th Century Chinese poet Tao Yuanmin, entitled The Peach Blossom Spring, a fable about a chance discovery of an ethereal perfect world. Improvising with a range of colors and processes, both the canvas and the artist are transformed and brought to a kind of utopian Eden as these enchanting, lush garden-scapes take shape. Applying gestural brush strokes intuitively and instinctively, Pan seeks to reinvigorate and reimagine the genre, her aesthetic intention being “the discovery of an unexpectedly lyrical, romantic and poetic world through the language of abstraction.”

Working with no definitive plan and guided by her emotions, Pan leads with color, exploring the range of possibility offered by her paints. Incorporating tight mark-marking with textured, sharp brushstrokes, the artist paints to the edge of the canvas utilizing a vivid color palette – from sunflower yellows to cobalt blues. Vacillating between botanical representation and abstraction, the artist’s dense compositions and bold repetitive marks is the synthesis of an Eastern interpretation of the Canadian landscape that she lives in. 

Pan’s merging of cultures is beautifully encapsulated in Morning Florals. Utilizing the Chinese Ma-Xia school of painting ‘One Corner' technique, paint is pushed to the edge of the canvas, leaving large areas more or less empty. Here, Pan's cool white oil paint covers the entire canvas. Then, working from the center to the top left, she applies exuberant colors of blue, white, brown, black and yellow. Playing with thick and thin varying strokes of paint, the amorphous forms coalesce into a brilliant, ambient floral landscape.

To Pan, every painting is a new revelation, often with surprisingly unexpected results. 

Born in 1976, Yangyang Pan studied at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute. Graduating with honors, Pan received her Bachelor of Arts in 1998 followed by a Masters 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. She received the Ontario Arts Council, Visual Artists Creation Projects Grant in 2020 and was awarded the Ontario Arts Council, Exhibition assistant award both in 2010 and 2019. Her work is widely collected in numerous private and public institutions such as Government of Ontario Art Collection, Apple (USA), Royal Elite International Academy (Canada), The Rochester Museum of Fine Art (USA), The Sichuan Fine Art Institute (China) and retail giants including Holt Renfrew (Canada), Anthropologie (USA), Amour Vert (USA), Vdara Las Vegas, and Provide Commerce (USA).

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*Interview with Archive Collective Magazine

YangYang Pan: Intuitive Abstracts Inspired by Nature

YangYang Pan studied at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute before moving to Toronto where she currently lives and works. Her joyful, botanical inspired abstract work draws inspiration from natural optical cues, infused with spirit and spontaneity sourced from her own emotions. Working with expressive, spontaneous brush strokes, YangYang’s energetic palette of colors reveals the contrasts she finds in nature. Her work will be part of a group exhibition at Archive Contemporary gallery in Montreal from February 8 to March 2.


To begin, could you tell us about your background in the arts? Where did your love of painting first begin, and how did it evolve over time?

Painting is always part of my life. I completed my art education in China – when I was young student of fine art, I had a great time playing with digital art like many other students did. As I gradually realized our world is going through enormous changes so quickly especially in the technological development, eventually I found myself more interested in exploring the possibility of traditional painting; the activity of handmade image-making, which is the practice that accords well with the idea of a spontaneous burst of self-expression.

I tried my hand at water color and acrylics, and now work with oils. In the beginning I enjoyed the improvisational approach to every beautiful moment that accidentally occurred on my canvases. Each painting was a new risk rooted in sensation. As I am working on larger scales paintings in the recent years, I became more serious about the idea, the composition and what was expected to translate onto canvas.

Your artist statement mentions the importance of your cultural identity navigated between East and West. Can you talk more about how this translates in your artwork?

I try to bridge East and West through my inspirations within the realm of art. As I grew up and received art education in China, most of my aesthetic consideration is rooted within eastern culture. When I was able to travel to North America for the first time in 2004, I felt the cultural differences that related to perception of art, creative expression among other areas. Seeing what is already there through new eyes resulted in an impetus for creating paintings rooted in deeply experiential and energetic realms from the larger cultural worldview, which also might exemplify Eastern attitudes towards impermanence, renewals and identity. It’s a good thing to think about all this culture diversity. However, when I actually work on the paintings, ideas about whom I am or where I am from generally do not come to mind. When the painting is in process, my identity and experience naturally emerges into the work.

Your work anchors itself in landscape, drawing inspiration from the tones, forms and energetic qualities of the natural world. Yet it also seems to reflect a more personal, emotional landscape. Do you see your paintings primarily as a representation of the inner world, the outer world, or a combination of both?

While I constantly inspired by the natural world, I am not particularly interested in attempting to portray true likenesses of nature. What I tried hard to do, instead, was to create paintings that captured a moment of change and instability, luminosity, the emotion, and the freedom that inspired in me, by employing the abstract language. I explore the range of possibility offered by my paints, merged with my own experiences of seeking inner peace while living in a complex social context.

What drew you to flowers and gardens as central symbols within your artwork? What do these botanical elements represent to you?

Flowers and gardens are metaphors for growth and transformation. The mood of my series of gardens paintings are generally lyrical, bursting with colours. These garden paintings were intended to convey the positive ideas of fortune, peace and wellbeing, and sentiments of joy.

What are some daily practices and rituals surrounding your studio work?

As an artist who is also mother to two girls, I find time in my studio after they go to school. I love to have a cup of tea and listen to music before painting. It’s a preparation that put me in the right place mentally. Once I start to paint, I tune out the music. I keep the volume low, and so that I it won’t distract my thoughts. I work daily, and of course need to be in an inspired mood. I periodically take the time to review my previous work and think about what’s next. My work sometimes quite big, sometimes small.

My paintings are reflections of my personal journey. They are the records of how I respond to my surroundings. They are lyrical and emotional. For me, the possibilities of painting are endless.

Who or what has inspired you most when it comes to your identity as an artist?

There are many ancient Chinese artists that always interested me. I am especially fond of Ma Yuan from the Northern Song dynasty and Bada Shanren from the Ming dynasty. Later, when I first time saw De
Kooning’s paintings in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C, I just felt so amazed. His mastery of figurative art within a well-controlled, large-scale context was incredible. I also enjoy looking at Joan Mitchell and Cy Townbly’s work as well.

What lies on the horizon for you in 2020 and beyond?

I’ve been keeping painting for the past decade. I am happy to be able to
continue painting in 2020. I am currently working on new series of paintings that towards my solo show at Madelyn Jordon Fine Art gallery in this spring 2020.

Yangyang’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada and US, as well as Italy and China. She has been invited to make numerous commissioned work. Noteworthy projects include Apple, Amour Vert, Holt Renfrew, Anthropologie. Yangyang’s work can be found in numerous private, public and corporate collections world wide.

https://thearchivecollective.com/2020/01/yangyang-pan-intuitive-abstracts-inspired-by-nature/



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

May 7, 2018 D. Dominick Lombardi

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

For show picture click here

Solo Exhibition 2017

Yangyang Pan's latest abstractions continue her exploration of composition and colour, and its relation to nature and our perception of it.

Through her expressive brushwork and vibrantly layered colour palette we witness each painting unfold before us. Organic forms envelope the canvas, finding a balance of negative and positive space. Even though the work is not representational, the titles provide a context that guides us through each piece like a trail marker. Here we find ourselves in wide open spaces contemplating the horizon, or in a dense forest dappled with light, and we are confronted with a feeling that is both disquieting and also liberating.

This occasion marks Yangyang Pan's 4th solo show with Parts Gallery. Yangyang's 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).

East Meets West in Contemporary Abstraction

PRESS RELEASE
Art Exhibition: YANGYANG PAN: East Meets West in Contemporary Abstraction

Date: Sept. 16– Oct. 29, 2016
Location: 37 Popham Rd, Scarsdale NY 10583
Artist: Yangyang Pan
Opening Reception, Friday Sept. 16, from 6-8:00 pm
Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is delighted to announce YANGYANG PAN: East Meets West in Contemporary Abstraction, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Chinese/Canadian artist Yangyang Pan. The exhibition includes 17 oil paintings on raw linen, created in the past 2 years, which embody the artist’s signature spontaneous, celebratory, and sensitive style. This will be Yangyang Pan’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The opening reception will take place on Friday Sept 16, from 6-8 PM and is open to the public.
Yangyang Pan’s large scale abstract paintings express the artist’s personal journey, cultural connections and aesthetic ideas. While ostensibly based on the dynamic visual forces of nature, these lyrical works are as much a landscape of Pan’s inner emotions, memories and history.
Says Pan: “I had a trip to China at the end of 2014, and it had been 6 years since my last trip. I was shocked by the huge change in my hometown Chongqing. The city had developed so quickly, strange but familiar. I was excited for these modern changes of the city, but on the other hand, I missed what trees and seasons smelled like in the past. The memory of odors was very rich. For many months thereafter, I let my mind wonder, to sense something I have the passion to paint. These paintings were the result.”
Pan’s paintings are created through an intuitive, spontaneous process beginning with her choice of palette, generally composed of bright and optimistic colors, exaggerations of those observed in nature. Laying down marks instinctually, Pan builds the surface over time, playing with thick and thin, varying strokes, while reacting to active and pleasant visual vibrations of paint against the raw linen. Each layer is a captured moment, the expressive gesture and activity reflected on its surface. Over time, the interlocking layers coalesce, creating a balanced, homogenous, and unified record of her emotional intensity.
The paintings’ titles provide visual cues to places in Pan’s memories. In Mountain Music, Under the Lemon Tree, and Wilderness, to name a few, floating, cloud-like clusters of thick paint give visual form and movement to the landscapes imagined in Pan’s sensual abstractions. Ethereal ribbon-like passages wrestle with strokes that abruptly stop and balance against broad open areas; at other times, strokes are crammed, in bold, lyrical spaces.
Yangyang Pan’s paintings, far more layered than those of the past, are a true fusion of Eastern and Western traditions. Pan, who is born and educated in China, credits Ma Yuan, the important Chinese landscape painter from the Song dynasty, known for his "one-corner" composition, as an influence. A painter in the shen shui tradition of pen and ink landscape painting, the intent is to capture an awareness of inner reality and wholeness, as though the painting flows directly from the artist’s mind, through the brush, onto the paper. Pan’s affinity for the work of American Abstract Expressionist painters Joan Mitchell, and Willem deKooning is also apparent. Like her mentors, Pan has the ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint. She has forged a vocabulary completely her own -- a unique blend of idea, desire and talent, emblematic of the global nature of art of our time.
Madelyn Jordon Fine Art, located in Scarsdale, NY is a fine art gallery focusing on 20th and 21stc art. Founded in 2001, MJFA has provided an open and friendly space for clients to discuss and view fresh, new work. The gallery mounts six annual exhibitions, handles the acquisition and resale of significant works by modern and contemporary artists, builds collections, and sources art for commercial and residential projects.


Driving Through Dream


Dynamic colour, held within striations of movement, texture, and reflective light, ignite the visual velocity of Yangyang Pan’s chromatic Driving Through a Dream. Romantic in language and adventurous in nature, Yangyang’s kaleidoscopic atmospheres are as vitally esoteric as they are ruthlessly present – pulling us, the driver, into landscapes of iridescence that tear the line between tangibility and imagination.

Aggressively saturated spectrums of colour, meticulously brushed in tonal levels of weight and temperature, build shadow and depth in scenes that could be Earthly – like the rainy streets at a brightly lit blue hour or a bouquet of florals beneath a blazing sunset – but not before Yangyang’s pure, visceral motion delivers us from that familiarity. As if caught within a tunnel of light at incredible speed, Yangyang’s loosely formed narrative bursts to life at the corner of each canvas – throwing us, head first, into speckled fantasies of energy and vibration. Contradictions in form trap the eye between liquidity and rigidity, while intelligent colourations forge phantom florals of thick substance in heavily filled space. In a single, visual moment, transcendence and sensation collide beneath the magnetism of Yangyang’s animated universe.

At the cornerstone of the conscious and the unconscious, Drive through Dream sits palpably between the arcane and the distinct. Flickering light and swift colour mark the sound of Yangyang’s collective expression – inviting emotion and humanity into a chrysalis of illusion and nature. Simultaneously, we are both the subject and the catalyst.

-Editor at Large, Fshnunlimited Magazine / Dylan Dias

Land of Allure


Land of Allure

9 Sep - 14 Oct 2015, First Canadian Place Gallery

These artists entice viewers into phenomenal worlds through seductive imagery that seize the senses onto a path of fantastical immersion. Melissa Doherty, is known for her excruciatingly detailed paintings of trees, either from above or from within the bowels of the bark, pulling viewers into the heart and soul of the bewitching world that comprises the sanctuary of the tree. Yangyang Pan's intense, mash-up collision of textural colours, pull viewers into her world of germinating abstraction, only to push our anxieties to her outer limits of bliss and utter serenity. Douglas Walker lures viewers into his fantastical layers of wonder through his monochromatic paintings of otherworldly imagery that includes architecture, numerical text and astonishing, unexplored lands.
Douglas Walker and Yangyang Pan are represented by Parts Gallery in Toronto.
Melissa Doherty is represented by Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art.


Inside Out

Throw a glance out the window, feel the pull. Eyes seek, settle; mind follows, stays. The border between inner and outer zones fades to a blur. Yangyang Pan has done her job. What has been outside comes in. 

As Yangyang Pan curates what nature has to offer, she situates the onlooker as an integral part of her work, for it is the ability to view the landscape thatprovides the link between seeing, seen and scene. She makes the connection between human and natural elements, to remind us that the landscape is not alone. Indeed, nor are we. Certainly, nature’s work can do without us, but the opposite cannot be said. Heedless, we draw lifeblood from our surroundings, but through artists such as Yangyang, we are made aware of how we are linked intrinsically to the gifts of the natural world.

Yangyang does the heavy lifting. Her emotional viewfinder and her bold use of colour, stroke and texture allow us to see, somewhat clearly, through a degree of abstraction. Cheeky, she makes sure to leave us at a point where we must make our own way to the end of the journey. Although the great outdoors is framed and edited through the artist’s vision, uultimately what we choose to see is up to us.

What is outside is gathered close and absorbed. What is internal to us is set free and reborn in our interpretation. What is inside is out.

Exhibition information: YangYang Pan: Inside Out, Nov 6 – 30, 2014, Parts Gallery,



DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

SCARSDALE, NEW YORK, MADENYN JORDON FINE ART GALLERY PRESENTS

Yangyang Pan: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

May 9 to June 21, 2014

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to present a second solo exhibition of paintings by Yangyang Pan entitled Down the Rabbit Hole from May 9 - June 2014. This marks the artist's first solo exhibition in New York since 2012. An opening reception will be held Friday, May 9, 2014 from 6-8PM. The public is invited. Previews and private showings are by appointment only.

On exhibit will be 11 paintings, completed in the past year, which highlight Pan's spontaneous lyrical approach to painting. The exhibition title, "Down the Rabbit Hole" serves as a metaphor for Pan's working process and personal existential journey inward in the creation of the works. Similarily, the title refers to historical artistic sources which have influenced Pan's celebratory style. Both provide a foundation for Pan's reinterpretation of action painting, fueled by youthful optimism, a cross-cultural history and outsized talent.

Like Alice in Wonderland following the March hare down the rabbit hole, Pan jumps into her painting feet first without looking in the hole or thinking about it. According to Pan, her paintings begin with openness--a space to explore conceptual ideas of memory, experience and emotion. A hands-on painter, she works intuitively, freely applying vigorous flurries of added or taken away, a self-imposed game explored through shapes, marks and colors, which organize the space of the canvas. At times her canvases are packed to the rafters with linear strokes; at other times, softer dabs of energetic colors float within fields of negative space. Canvases of raw linen, a new surface for Pan, accentuate depth, evoking a sense of deep physical space.

Channeling de Kooning, and Mitchell, Pan's fierce, unbashed, joyful clor palette evokes powerful emotional responses. Unapologetically ecstatic visions of nature's flora are rendered with both guts and grace--evoking a personal style which seeks honesty, openness and pleasure.

Unlike the Abstract Expressionist artists of the mid-20th century, who communicated the uncertainty and fear of a post World War II nuclear world, Pan's abstract painting evokes an idealistic, optimistic, global view. A link between Eastern and Western sensibilities, her works are successful for the subtle way she changes ab-ex tradition, and is emblematic of painting in the 21st century.

Yangyang Pan was born in 1976 in China. She received her BFA and MFA from the Sichuan Fina Art Institute in Chongqing, China, where she later taught. In 2006, she relocated to Canada with her husband and children. She has exhibited both in Canada, and the United States.


The Beautiful Moment

Toronto, Parts gallery presents

Yangyang Pan: The Beautiful Moment

Oct 10 to Nov 3, 2013

It is the sudden jolt when you become acutely aware of your surroundings. It is the sharp intake of breath that coincides with a double take. It is the ache of longing for the intangible: the very essence of what you see before you. It is the realization that there exists something bigger than you and your nitty-gritty. It is when you cease to see with only your eyes, when clarity is delivered with your whole being. It is the beautiful moment.

Yangyang Pan’s new body of work is a rich representation of this moment. Her series is composed of quiet landscapes and lush florals. Her brushstrokes are a call to action; they challenge, mesmerize and tease.

Yangyang’s abstract landscapes are compelling islands of fantasy vegetation that loom out of the mist. The exuberant nature of the artist’s palette is tempered by the soft blue greys that form a magical fog. Yangyang leads us to a place where we feel we are on the cusp of discovery. This beautiful moment is one of peace. The calm that settles allows us to recognize this Toronto painter’s adroitness with colour and composition, almost an act of alchemy. In a moment of lucidity we grasp that she has captured the intensity of life itself. Yangyang Pan sets the stage so artfully for our seduction. We cannot help but succumb to a reaction of pure emotion.

Yangyang’s new group of gardens and floral portraits, however, releases in us an almost physical pleasure. A heady mix of joy so strong it borders on fear, this beautiful moment is akin to flirting with the loss of control. It is overwhelming; we do not know if we will be able to experience such a burst of self-recognition again. Humbled by the potency of this visual feast, we are quick to put reason aside. The urge to be enveloped by her gardens and smothered beneath the velvet petals becomes too much. Yangyang’s bouquets compel us to lunge forward, to take what we can and make away with it. And isn’t that what the beautiful moment is all about?

Yangyang Pan’s gift to us is that she can make the moment last.

Parts Gallery presents new works by Yangyang Pan, October 10 – November 3, 2013. The exhibition takes place at 1150 Queen Street East, Toronto, Ontario.


Wordless translation

It seems wrong to use words to describe the work of Yangyang Pan. Words are too black and white, letters too rigid to capture what it is Yangyang feels, sees and then translates through her paintbrush. Words seem the opposite of what is evoked: at first an ephemeral grasp on what feels like fleeting beauty, followed by the realization that the beauty has, indeed, been captured and will not flit away in the blink of an eye. This is Yangyang’s gift to us.

But the words do come, sometimes in a rush, prompted by the poetry on canvas proposed by this compelling Toronto artist. We want to elaborate on what she offers; however, if we pause, we realize that there is no need to decipher. We just need to keep looking. For Yangyang Pan’s work is, despite its abstraction (or perhaps because of it), complete in itself. A tidy package on the one hand, a fury of magic on the other, it is a gemstone of narrative, the few perfect notes, a choreography of colour.

Yangyang’s lyrical compositions burst with movement and energy that come to a delicate halt at just the right moment. This is due not to hesitation or reserve, but the artist’s skill at achieving balance. She exercises a certain measure of control over her strokes, yes, but is not afraid to let them lead her to a place where they can remain alive. An accomplished painter for many years, Yangyang’s trust in her brushstrokes and confidence in her palette allow her work to expose a freshness that will not be contained.

Yangyang absorbs the world around her in its most natural state and transforms her observations into paintings that are expressions of this connection. What can be difficult to grasp in its raw beauty becomes finessed into more manageable servings. But the intensity still overwhelms and humbles us.

Whether drawn in by the textures, the colours both vivid and gentle or the clever compositions, we are made to feel welcome to take our own place as interpreters within this artist’s realm. Through her work, Yangyang Pan helps us to see a world that is sometimes best described through images rather than words.

By Sabine Modder - Managing Editor – Mocoloco.com


SCARSDALE, NEW YORK, MADENYN JORDON FINE ART GALLERY PRESENTS

Yangyang Pan:Spring Fever

May 3 June 16, 2012

SCARSDALE, NY (February 17, 2012) Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to announce Spring Fever, a series of new oil paintings on canvas by Canadian artist Yangyang Pan, in her first solo exhibition in New York. An opening reception will be held Thurs., May 3, 2012 from 6-8PM. The public is invited. Previews and private showings are by appointment only.

Pan expansive, joyous paintings are pure aesthetic pleasure. Informed by the controlled chaos of nature, this series of landscape-based, expressionist of works is rich in color and texture, densely packed with oil paint. Celebrating Spring arrival, her emotionally-charged canvases are laden with abstract imagery. Their vibrant palette greens, blues, pinks, yellows and reds applied with alternating heavy impasto brushstrokes and thin washes of oil paint -- create canvases bursting with visual excitement. Pan summer Garden evokes the energy of a star burst with the color palette of her garden. This kinetic composition is composed of visceral markings, each with their own energy, held together as a collective through the connection one brushstroke has with another. Pan explores nature diversity by pairing splashy, exuberant works with compositions of seductive, floating forms, such as in Ebb Tide with its drizzles of paint and charcoal. These works tend to suggest the captivating nature of slow moving clouds during the vernal equinox or the blooming foliage on Lake Ontario at the start of the season.

Stylistically, Pan fuses Asian and Western sensibilities seamlessly. Raised and educated in Sichuan, China, there is a clear influence of traditional Asian painting in the build-up of her markings on the canvas. At times, Pan crowds paint into corners, leaving white space in unlikely areas. Sometimes her markings cascade vertically, referencing traditional Chinese landscape painting. Other times, she fills the entire canvas with extravagantly colored, uninhibited strokes, recalling the all-over style of Joan Mitchell or Jackson Pollock.

The artist does not make a study or draft of each painting before she confronts the canvas. Instead, all choices, both conscious and subconscious, are made during the creation process. Her mark-making method consists of working herself up into a raptured rhythm while listening to music by Leonard Cohen. In the end, intuitive, gestural brushwork and unpredictable color arrangements form on the canvas. Her subject is the process of painting itself, as she revels in the activity, creating playful accidents that result from free-wheeling experimentation.

The show title, Spring Fever, refers to the common phrase that is used to describe the physical and psychological effects that arrive during a season often considered a time for rebirth and renewal. Spring is often associated with the hostility and hospitality of nature, a tease as the winter weather turns warm, accompanied by bursts of color as foliage blooms. Pan explores these elements of nature in her paintings, developing a visual, saturated language that feeds off of nature impulsive energy. The result is a visual rhetoric of pure feeling and youthful exuberance.

Yangyang Pan was born in 1976 in China. She received her BFA and MFA from the Sichuan Fine Art Institute in Chongqing, China, where she later taught. In 2006, she relocated to Canada with her husband and children. She is currently based in Ontario, Canada.


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