Exhibition on the margin of summer
26.06.2015 / 06:43 | Aktualizováno: 19.03.2018 / 04:30
Here we have another Beijing Summer. Red-hot cement, humidity and the sky covered by the carpet of fog and smog. The need to escape that is becoming more and more urgent feeling. We are looking for the light. Like in the magic castle we can only pass the screens. We are returning to us, ourselves. We mean to revoke the fantasy. We find the world of the fragments, the world of dreams. And this is the world where the exhibition of the paintings and artefacts created by young artistic duo Zhang Yue and Li Yan will take us. The exposition will take place at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Beijing at the beginning of July.
The main figure of the exhibition this time is Zhang Yue. The young painter, originally from China’s “northeast”, develops the theme of feminine beauty – both ephemeral and eternal – in all its fragility, inner glow and also elusiveness. Her paintings are permeated with revelry in its glamour and nostalgia while at the same time recognizing its inevitable demise. Beautiful dreams shatter in the shards of mirrors, the windows have cracks in them that deform the viewed object, pushing it towards us, towards human imperfection, towards life. And what really cannot be denied is Zhang Yue’s sincerity, her genuineness, her purity. In her life and also in her art. The strength of her expression lies in the power of desire. Her work is intimate, quiet, not provocative, and at the same time filled with a kind of demure appeal. It calls for communication, it calls for heart-to-heart dialogue.
Li Yan, a painter renowned especially for his magnificent technique, inexorably yet extremely poetically captures the geometry of space, the tension of critical situations and emptiness. In this exhibition he complements Zhang Yue’s paintings with a set of original artifacts. They are slumbering subjects whose dreams of bygone days are only slightly disturbed by the subtle interventions of the young artist who, without wanting to disturb his objects in their pensive meditation, breathes new life into them. Photographs, instruments and work tools here are not just witnesses to a historical context, but, thanks to the extraordinary talent of the artist, have returned to the present, to speak out, to bring delight, to lead us to exaltation.
I think that the work of the art duo of Zhang Yue and Li Yan will captivate viewers. In Beijing’s sweltering summer their works will certainly provide refreshment. The curtain is rising, the performance is beginning …
Official opening of the exhibition of Zhang Yue and Li Yan pictures followe by the performance of the Folklore dance group DANAJ will take place on July 1, 2015 at the premises of the Czech Embassy.
