On April 23, 2016, Yan Huang Art Museum’s annual arts event “Spring of Yan Huang – Yan Huang Art Museum 2016 Spring Art Festival” was opened. The festival contains four thematic events: “City Biography” video installation exhibition, “A Single Life – Enquiry” photography and video exhibition, “Flowers and Ink Play” ink painting exhibition, as well as “A Gentle and Pleasurable Breeze” an outdoor sketching course of ink painting, through the painting, image, installation, and sketches, the festival shortens the distance between the public and art, to help art enter the life of the public.

Director of Yan Huang Art Museum Cui Xiaodong addressed the opening ceremony and he said that, blending a variety of media to display in a big show was a new attempt of Yan Huang Art Museum and he hoped the audience could feel the charming features of different forms in art through this contrast, and feel the artistic intervention of contemporary life from multiple perspectives.

“Flowers and Ink Play – Invitational Exhibition of Young Artists of Chinese Painting” is composed of 16 artists’ works. Based on the exhibition space they chose or created the corresponding works and imaginatively display them, to create a field where paintings are placed in a special space, and the audience can “walk into” it: the artists Guan Jian and Li Xia place the works in a space composed of dozens of lanterns – the lanterns were made by the students from Huoying Central Primary School, the works contrast with each other, to commonly depict the landscapes in their minds; Bian Kai places the works in a closed space from the perspective of support, his works are suspended in front of the inscription rubbing “Invitational Scriptures Cave” in the Northern Wei Period, another artist Zhou Ting’s Guanyin Bodhisattva “Avalokitesvara” makes the space more spiritual; the artist Yuna Kanazawa from Japan concatenates the videos based on nature and her work interprets her view of nature; Wang Huixiao’s concise religious images offer the whole exhibition hall a quiet atmosphere; Huang Haifei uses the bizarre imagination to present a world between nightmare and utopia.

The part of “City Biography” photography installation is composed of the artists at home and abroad: some of them are professionals in the field of interior design and architecture, with a life’s position in art and they grasp the graphic and three-dimensional spatial visual form with a ready plan in the mind, which makes their works act in contrast to and echo the ink painting exhibition and interactive images, and also means the audience is more interested in the work itself than being curious about their identities. These works present the images that are sometimes desolate, sometimes boisterous, or humorous, or idle – in addition to embodying the characteristics of the rapid development of Beijing, they also reveal their confusion and curiosity about the city in which they have lived for a long time, as well as the presentation of everyone’s pressure and tension brought by the experiences of living abroad and the urban lifestyle.

The part of “A Single Life” features the work by the video artist Shen Bolun who takes full advantage of the characteristics of the media of video itself, through the means such as montage, multi-screen recording to build the mental picture of contemporary urban life, and the video can be regarded as digital media’s strong interference on daily living.

The Spring Festival also attaches great importance to public educational activity,on the opening day, Yan Huang Art Museum organized “A Gentle and Pleasurable Breeze” outdoor sketching course, it is also part of the public educational events combined with exhibitions which are continuously held by Yan Huang Art Museum, when the audience visits the exhibition, they can also experience the fun of creation. In the sketching event, the audience was guided by the artists who participated in the “Flowers and Ink Play – Invitational Exhibition of Young Artists of Chinese Painting”, using the change of the thick and thin ink to draw the spring objects with a gentle and pleasurable breeze. This part of the works will also be displayed on the ground floor exhibition hall during next week.

The festival continues to May 12.

Text and photo by Zhang Wenzhi/CAFA ART INFO

Translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO