Yau Wing Fung: All’s well, ends well.

Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition in the US of works by Chinese artist Yau Wing Fung (b. 1990) All’s well, ends well. Yau works across a range of genres and mediums, including traditional and contemporary ink painting, calligraphy, and installation. Yau’s recent paintings combine traditional aesthetics and a contemporary sensibility by mobilizing the vocabulary of classical landscape painting as well as the aerial view of satellite image. In Yau’s installations, he explored the spatial relationship between viewer and representation of landscape by reconstructing painting frames.

Yau is especially interested in new aesthetic possibilities brought about by technology. A direct reference for Yau is satellite image, especially those used for recording weather changes and geographic information. A satellite often produces a sequence of images when photographing a large area or recording changes over a period of time. The interpretation of this congregate of information involves the reading of the general layout, as well as analysis of the convergences and variations between different images. By appropriating the format of satellite images, Yau gestured towards a similar viewership. Viewers are likely to constantly shift their attention between individual parts and the whole composition, between the reading of consecutive grids and the sight of a landscape.

Yau’s works reframe the idea of guan and yuan through a contemporary lens. Guan refers to a contemplative way of looking that involves viewers’ imagination of a space that expands outside the picture frame. Yuan inspires people to look beyond the visible and finite towards the boundless and infinite. “Guan represents my inner sensibility and feeling when I encounter an object; yuan encapsulates my spiritual pursuit when I paint,” Yau wrote. His works offer new expressions of guan and yuan by reconfiguring perspective, pictorial depth, the balance between emptiness and solidness, and surface texture.

Unlike the appreciation of traditional paintings, time does not flow linearly in the viewing of Yau’s works. The grids set up a rhythm similar to the automatic movement of a machine. They reconfigure the picture plane into uniform and countable segments, around which people structure their viewing experience. This aspect of Yau’s paintings responds to the contemporary visuality deeply entrenched by technological developments. It poses the thorny problem of how human beings approach nature in an era when the intermediation of man-made devices has become unavoidable.

Yau Wing Fung (b. 1990, Hong Kong) received his master’s degree in Fine Arts and bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He now lives and works in Hong Kong.

In his latest series Looming Sceneries, Yau adopted an aerial view, indicated by cloud painted with a diaphanous quality. He often painted cloud on both the front and back of the thin cicada paper. The half-transparent paper allows the paint at the back to be discerned from the front. In this way, the back color that shows through, the materiality of the paper, and the front of the painting conjure a translucent yet densely textured surface. It weaves various compositional elements into a continuum, guiding viewers’ eyes to move smoothly from one part of the painting to another.

Yau has held six solo shows in Hong Kong and Macau. His artworks have appeared at various international venues, such as Art Basel (Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre), Wu Bin: Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Chinese Contemporary Ink (Christie’s Auction), Ink Asia (Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre), Art Taipei (Taipei World Trade Center), among others. His paintings have entered public and private collections, including the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.