Paintings
All work and photographs © Yanwen Xiong
Yanwen Xiong
About the artist
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About the work
YanWen Xiong paints vases, single vases floating in space, but then we might not be persuaded that they have a substantial place in the world. Instead they hover in a space of the in-between: but in- between what? Without any way of really knowing, they are between non-being and being (a third state).
So as much as referring to something worldly (object-like), they are closer to a passage of register that records the passage of one state to another state. On the level of pictorial embodiment, they are closer to a presentation of transition or a flicker of becoming. Attention shifts from an object of the world, into a process of mental ideation through which an image is itself possible.
Here we start to entertain several possibilities which all call upon the powers of abstraction in which the image is fading back into the very sea of emptiness out of which appearance started to make manifest.
Text by Jonathan miles