Hundred Years Gallery is very proud to present the first solo show by Chinese artist Yvonne Feng.
Yvonne was publicly voted as one of the two favourite artists selected in the open call ‘Now in Reverse’ during December 2014 at Hundred Years Gallery and rewarded with a solo show.
Private view on Thursday 3rd of December from 7 to 9.30.
Yvonne Feng’s practice explores the subjects of loss, absence, presence, entrapment, and power relationships. Derived from personal and fictional narratives, her drawings and paintings present absurd scenarios in which an individual embraces interwoven emotions and unfolds a split contradictory self, in conflict with the others and her surroundings. Her work often has a fractured and contingent quality in terms of time and space with a mysterious idea of narrative following through. Feng’s practice hovers over the boundaries between art and life. The narrative in her work refers to a political event, one that happened to her family, in anambivalent and ambiguous manner. It transforms beyond the specifics of a personal story and occupies a shared emotional space with the viewer. Her work shows an urge to represent the reality of daily life, historical events and contemporary affairs. Through drawing and painting, she recalls a specific touch, moment or event. Such tracing activity is not to mirror what exists or has passed, but to realise it and to search for unrealised possibilities. She forges the raw material of life events into stories, then constructs a fictional space which encapsulates her psychological states and reflects upon the outside world.
Feng’s work challenges the nature of communication and the potential of storytelling in contemporary drawing and painting, furthermore addressing the questions of how much one should disclose one’s life stories in making art, to what extent one’s life stories determine how artwork is read, and how the work of art as a fictional creation is able to imply the meaning of one’s life.
Biography:
Yvonne Feng (b.1989, China) completed her BA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2012, her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and is currently studying for PhD in Fine Arts at the Slade.
Feng was the winner of the 2015 Excellence in Drawing Award, presented by The Arts Club Charitable Trust. Her recent group exhibitions include ‘Creekside Open 2015’, in APT Gallery, London; ‘Psychoanalytic research in the 21st century: Where we are now’, in Freud Museum, London; ‘Griffon Art Prize’, in Griffon Gallery, London / White Moose, Devon; ‘Now in Reverse’, in Hundred Years Gallery, London; ‘Drawing from Here and There’, in Elysium Gallery offsite, Swansea / Clara Hatton Gallery, Fort Collins, USA.
