Double Square 双方藝廊

Double Square Gallery is delighted to present The Fragments, which is artist Yen Yu-Ting’s latest and first solo exhibition at Double Square Gallery, and will run from December 16 to February 17, 2023. The exhibition features more than a dozen of two-dimensional paintings and sculptures. Yen’s practice revolves around the possibility of narrative in ink painting, exploring and re-interpreting the cultural context of ink painting and its dialogue with contemporary life experience. In this exhibition, she further transforms traditional ink painting techniques through inscribing news headlines in her images and letting them grow and sprawl, conveying her introspection and writing of her inner world reflected by her observation and documentation of the world.

Yen often draws inspiration from her personal experiences and fictitious scenarios to form the foundation of her work. She then combines this foundation with news images and texts to transform traditional ink painting vocabularies as a way to delineate the collective restlessness and absent-mindedness in contemporary society, along with the absurdities and intriguing qualities therein. The Fragments reveals the artist’s painting process: sometimes she seems to withdraw residual pieces of memories from the information flow, utilizing layers of ink rendering to extract texts from entangling lines. At other times, she seems to bring back everyday remnants by inscribing the latest news headlines with dry ink. This is also her latest experiment in recent years, through which she blends traditional ink technique of “ts'un” (wrinkle or texture strokes) with news events, creating works different from her previous fine brush paintings of Eastern gouache that have a light, bright palette. Using solely the layering of ink, this group of new works reveals an enveloping, serene, and repressive inner space constructed in a purer way.

Traditional ink painters place an emphasis on “wrinkle strokes,” which form the brushwork to express natural terrain and create the forms of objects. Yen, on the other hand, has viewed “wrinkle strokes” as the focal point of her creative work. Gathering and inscribing news headlines in her images for a long period time, she enables the texts to grow and change together with time and news events. Through the works on view, the artist demonstrates her endeavor in expanding the possibility of “wrinkle strokes” as well as the experimental result of re-incorporating the brushwork back into the structure of the images. Consequently, texts, messages, and memories become continuously entwined through writing and painting, repeatedly oscillating between “extraction (glazing)” and “erasure (writing, wrinkling).” In this regard, the technique of traditional “wrinkle strokes” is not just continued through her work. To a large extent, it has been transformed into an approach of delineating memory and the texture of psychic states, as well as the central component to express personal thoughts, document contemporary events, and reminisce, thus infusing Yen’s work with a narrative aesthetics informed by her highly unique yet emotionally resonating portrayal of both the external and the inner worlds.