BANK is proud to announce that artists Yanyan Huang and Heidi Voet are participating in "Continuous Regeneration", an art exhibition across industries with the theme on sustainable environment on view till February 16, 2020. The exhibition brings together more than 40 artists, designers and creatives from 16 countries, using paintings, installations, videos, multidisciplinary design and other forms of artistic language to address the sustainable development of art and the environment, material life, as well as topics such as energy and futureecology. Presenting these in a poetic form, the exhibition opens a discussionon the status quo of human-nature coexistence and seeks breakthroughs.
Heidi Voet
"The plastic bag is a vessel for an ever-changing content". Heidi Voet's participating works look like tribal masks, made from weaved plastic bags. While the bag acts as a skin around the contents inside and transport items from one place to the next, masks also disguise the wearer's identity, enabling them to exhibit behaviors outside social conventions. Tribal masks are traditionally used in rites of passage from one state to the another- boyhood to man, life to death- and inevitably refer to Europe's infamous colonial legacy.
Voet repeatedly positions the plastic bag as a shifting actor in her work. The whimsical quality of the plastic bags is seen throughout Heidi Voet's earlier work. Voet imbues common, overlooked objects value and meaning - such as cheap digital watches transformed into acarpet, or Chinese magazines folded into floral arrangements- through the simple act of making and playing.
Yanyan Huang
Huang Yanyan’s painting practice, characterized by vital, spinning patterns and uniquely romantic colors, reflects a complex carefree mode of personal expression. Deeply influenced by the tradition of Lyrical Abstraction, and the work of Hans Hartung in the West and Zao Wou-ki in the East, Huang’s gestures and movements come together on her canvases, bringing painter’s options back into contemporary explorations; her spontaneous brush strokes, which at times look like scribbles or calligraphy, are marks that run parallel with time, constantly constructing a rich, and even immortal, personal reality.
Huang’s paintings are very large but not without intimacy. There are no overwhelming narratives related to metaphorical legends; instead, they represent a purer painting phenomenon. They resemble the histories and patterns of collective human visual experience, which subconsciously wait to be extended, deepened, and developed, and the artist’s every brush stroke and color combination is a juncture in this evolution. Even as the works embody history, Huang has a contemporary yet timeless way of removing the eternal division between content and form, and the result is a unifying object without a unified center. Sometimes, a group of forms appear before our eyes, and we can only permit the forms, which are difficult to capture, to appear and disappear. This young artist’s familiarity and integration of Baroque music, modern dance and opera, and the performative and expressive qualities of these art forms are reinforced in her painting. In fact, the existence of painting allows for the possibility of other artistic forms, and vice versa.(Text/Fuca Yuan)