Exhibition date: January 7- February 4, 2024
Opening: Jan 7, 15:00-18:00
Address: 108, Building 13, No30, Lane 319 Jiaozhou Rd, Shanghai
Artists: Yan Bingqian & Roxanne Tingyi Wang
Exhibition Text:
The reason why I named the title “Les Femmes Formidables” is more than its literal
meaning. The adjective formidable in English suggests something “fearsome” or
“difficult to deal with,” whereas in French it means “marvellous” or “extraordinary.”
With nearly 30% of vocabulary shared between English and French, the two
languages are full of so-called faux amis: words that look the same but so different in
meaning.
Compared with her earlier works, Yan Bingqian (hereafter “Yan”) now paints in a clearer, more saturated way, with dense colour and precise brushwork. Her canvases are filled with bodies which, unlike the “divinely wrapped” nudes of past centuries, are not about eroticism but about a concrete symbol for emotional tension. For Yan, the body carries something uncertain, something that resists rational comprehension. Her figures have no emphatic gender, no hair, and their noses are barely sketched out. “Those things are redundant when it comes to expressing emotion,” she says. Entwined bodies, sitting quietly on benches, holding babies, or lifting legs overhead — whatever their poses, her bodies share a slack, almost daydreaming expression. They point back to an essential humanity, to desire and love without disguise, like adolescents in their fearless unknowing. Literature has its “omniscient point of view”: a mirror-like objectivity beyond any single character. Aristotle wrote, “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” Under today’s democratic and egalitarian impulses, the line collapses, yet a majority still read female artists through prejudice — she “must possess that mysterious, threatened reality called femininity.” Yan does not paint from a “female” perspective; she works from that omniscient stance, showing both the delirious power of women and the fragility of men.
Looking at Wang Tingyi’s (hereafter “Roxanne’s”) paintings, you sense a daily undercurrent of contradiction and mystery. Roxanne examines her own life and collages fragments of memory onto canvas as clues. In two large works shown side by side, the viewer’s eye is caught by rows of jewellery. For its owner, jewellery is profoundly private: it absorbs body heat, retains scent, and its daily unfastening makes a singular sound. However time moves on, these objects can instantly trigger memory. Around the jewellery are neurons on one side, and mutant butterflies and shells on the other — the softer self “protected” by its ornaments. Her polarised palette and the way she scrapes paint from dark to light reflect an inner tug of emotion; In each finished piece, she lived through day and night.
For Roxanne, the linkage between past, present and future is essential. She sees memory as something archived; once retrieved it becomes a freshly minted past. This echoes the idealised future of Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” where memories no longer depend on the brain but on external devices, activated for five hours a week to revisit any where any moment. We began to draw to preserve memory; from the ancient two-dimensional to today’s multi-dimensional, memory has gained shape, colour, sound and even tactile presence. Roxanne disassembles female organs into torsos symmetrical like brains, forming a mature abstract pattern speaking its own encrypted language. These symbolic images contrast sharply with other motifs in her work, a natural manifestation of her inner queerness. Compared to the last century’s American portrait painters who captured mood through the figure, Roxanne’s content extends beyond people to all the objects she refuses to forget. In her left–right brain leaps, these contents acquire a delicate secrecy; what remains between the viewer and the work is a direct, unadorned emotional resonance. In her own words, the mood in her paintings is “nostalgia” and “a sense of psychological loss.”
Across life, there are always formidable women — appearing at different times, standing alone against the collective, stripping away long-imposed restraints. They enact faux amis to the extreme: the glint that slips through cracks beneath sensitivity, and the scarlet flare that erupts when reason collides. Difficult to deal with? — yes. But all the more, marvellous.
Compared with her earlier works, Yan Bingqian (hereafter “Yan”) now paints in a clearer, more saturated way, with dense colour and precise brushwork. Her canvases are filled with bodies which, unlike the “divinely wrapped” nudes of past centuries, are not about eroticism but about a concrete symbol for emotional tension. For Yan, the body carries something uncertain, something that resists rational comprehension. Her figures have no emphatic gender, no hair, and their noses are barely sketched out. “Those things are redundant when it comes to expressing emotion,” she says. Entwined bodies, sitting quietly on benches, holding babies, or lifting legs overhead — whatever their poses, her bodies share a slack, almost daydreaming expression. They point back to an essential humanity, to desire and love without disguise, like adolescents in their fearless unknowing. Literature has its “omniscient point of view”: a mirror-like objectivity beyond any single character. Aristotle wrote, “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” Under today’s democratic and egalitarian impulses, the line collapses, yet a majority still read female artists through prejudice — she “must possess that mysterious, threatened reality called femininity.” Yan does not paint from a “female” perspective; she works from that omniscient stance, showing both the delirious power of women and the fragility of men.
Looking at Wang Tingyi’s (hereafter “Roxanne’s”) paintings, you sense a daily undercurrent of contradiction and mystery. Roxanne examines her own life and collages fragments of memory onto canvas as clues. In two large works shown side by side, the viewer’s eye is caught by rows of jewellery. For its owner, jewellery is profoundly private: it absorbs body heat, retains scent, and its daily unfastening makes a singular sound. However time moves on, these objects can instantly trigger memory. Around the jewellery are neurons on one side, and mutant butterflies and shells on the other — the softer self “protected” by its ornaments. Her polarised palette and the way she scrapes paint from dark to light reflect an inner tug of emotion; In each finished piece, she lived through day and night.
For Roxanne, the linkage between past, present and future is essential. She sees memory as something archived; once retrieved it becomes a freshly minted past. This echoes the idealised future of Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” where memories no longer depend on the brain but on external devices, activated for five hours a week to revisit any where any moment. We began to draw to preserve memory; from the ancient two-dimensional to today’s multi-dimensional, memory has gained shape, colour, sound and even tactile presence. Roxanne disassembles female organs into torsos symmetrical like brains, forming a mature abstract pattern speaking its own encrypted language. These symbolic images contrast sharply with other motifs in her work, a natural manifestation of her inner queerness. Compared to the last century’s American portrait painters who captured mood through the figure, Roxanne’s content extends beyond people to all the objects she refuses to forget. In her left–right brain leaps, these contents acquire a delicate secrecy; what remains between the viewer and the work is a direct, unadorned emotional resonance. In her own words, the mood in her paintings is “nostalgia” and “a sense of psychological loss.”
Across life, there are always formidable women — appearing at different times, standing alone against the collective, stripping away long-imposed restraints. They enact faux amis to the extreme: the glint that slips through cracks beneath sensitivity, and the scarlet flare that erupts when reason collides. Difficult to deal with? — yes. But all the more, marvellous.