Raging Rooms: Yin Zhaoyang Solo Exhibition
By Zhang Yingying
Based on his intuition, he once again developed a new understanding of the possibilities and essence of painting.
As an act of direct mark-making, painting provides an immediate and spontaneous way for the artist's ideas to unfold, as well as for images to be presented. Yin Zhaoyang uses his brush and once again turns painting into a tool for revealing the unseen and making the familiar unrecognizable.
“Raging Rooms” presents a lesser-known aspect of artist Yin Zhaoyang’s painting practice. For the first time in this exhibition, he extensively uses acrylic, a highly soluble and fluid material. In the change of medium, he returns to the method he used twenty years ago - a very diverse and unpredictable way of painting - drawing. Drawings often embody their own aesthetics, the artist’s intuition, and confidence. Yin Zhaoyang’s drawings are done in both monochrome and color. Inspired by the transformative potential of the medium, in addition to drawings, acrylics, and oil paintings, he has also created a series of magazine collage paintings, which express his thoughts and concerns about various insignificant entertainment events in the mass media, translated into humorous banters and reflections.
Over the past twenty years, Yin has developed his attitude and style towards events and symptoms of the times through his keen observation of society, human nature, history, and traditional Chinese culture. He remains an idealist in his mid-life. His works have departed from rendering images that portray reality and sublimate to a type of image-making that relies on long-accumulated emotions. The broad brushstrokes and expressionistic core of his works are infectious and full of familiar, empathetic appeal.
Yin Zhaoyang always pushes the most expressive power of his paintings to the extreme, while his expressions of social conflict and absurdities seem discrete, which may be the reason why his works seem obscure and uncanny emotions. His works on canvas remind one of silent theater or a highly vigilant art form. He projects his passion intuitively into his works while hoping to preserve a naivete and sensibility in the medium of his practice.
*Translated from Chinese by He Xiao.（英⽂翻译：贺潇）
Room 1: Recovering that nameless thing
In this room, the human spirit is re-imagined.
Room 2: The Persistence of Drawing
By placing the drawings within a larger framework, Yin transforms them into an independent and autonomous “impact system.”
Room 3: Raging Rooms (works on paper also can be penetrating)
Here, it exhibits a chance event and a unique encounter, which implies changes in the foreseeable language of art.
Yin Zhaoyang, born in 1970 in Nanyang, Henan Province, China. He graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Represented by Yin Zhaoyang and other artists, “Cruelty of Youth Paintings” in the late 1990s have added to this category an experimental dimension and enhanced its depth of thinking in terms of narrativity, pictorial concept and aesthetic taste, constituting a major tendency in avant-garde painting of a decade. In his later series of works such as “Myth”, “Utopia”, “Façade”, through in-depth internal inquiry and complex yet profound language exploration, he completed the transformation from experiencing the sensitive youth to a deeper spiritual world, and became an important representative of China's "new painting". Since 2011, Yin Zhaoyang has turned to a "spiritual landscape" with a strong personal temperament, a keen contemporary perspective, and a profound tradition. With a magnificent and pure painting language, he has developed a new scope of painting that includes both personal and social, historical and present landscape.
Zhang Yinginig, She is an independent curator and writer living in Beijing. She has been a researcher of Documenta in Kassel, an award-winning curator of the Emerging Curators Project 2019 of Power Station of Art in Shanghai(PSA), a candidate of the Documenta Institute Fellowship Programme 2022, and an operator of art media“TOOLS AT WORK”. She strives to investigate the visual manifestations and philosophical connotations of Information Age artistic language, tools and methods.
