Catalog: The Unveiling
PRESS: Artes Magazine

PRESS RELEASE

We are pleased to announce THE UNVEILING, a solo exhibition of new works by YANGYANG PAN. This exhibition marks the artist's fourth solo exhibition with MJFA and will be on view from April 20 - June 2, 2018, with an opening reception on Friday, April 20th from 6:00-8:00 p.m. The public is welcome to attend and meet the artist.

This exhibition presents eleven of Yangyang Pan's new paintings, based on landscape, all created in the past year.  Pan’s gorgeous, opulent compositions oscillate between abstraction and representation. Applying expressive gestural brush strokes, her rich palette of colors reveals the contrasts she finds in nature. Working intuitively and spontaneously, Pan's unique fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities continues to inform her artistic vision and output.

Pan’s love of flowers and gardens is central to her work. However, they are a means to an end. For Pan, flowers, gardens, nature are bound up with action painting, and the freedom she finds through artmaking. (She names Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, among others, as influences). Thus, some paintings border on recognizable “pretty” bouquets, while others appear wild, aggressive, and totally abstract. Pan’s ab-ex style is simply a reflection of her personal journey, beginning in traditional Chinese art training from age 6, to her move West, where she was exposed to Western abstraction in depth. 

Employing oil paints on mostly raw, large-scaled linen canvases, Pan deftly punctuates the canvas with splotches of thick, textured brushstrokes of varying shapes and colors, layering paint over paint. Through her improvisational method, the amorphous forms emerge as a cohesive whole that extend to the edge of the canvas, as if without measurable boundaries. The vibrant, energetic dark colors are harmoniously balanced by the soft, pastel hues which seem to imbue each painting with an ambient light.

A beautiful illustration can be observed in the painting entitled In Between the Blossom. This work features a bountiful, cornucopia of botanical blooms rendered in a palette of warm tones of yellow, pink, peach, light blue, maroon, and brown. The thick, textured jagged dabs of paint express Pan’s unrestrained romanticism. Her high level of skill is in combining and blending contrasting colors to create this lavish garden landscape of paradise. This sublime painting is an invitation to immerse oneself in a world of color and texture. 

To Pan, the building of the canvas represents a captured moment- a reflection of her personal, emotional landscape- which is reinforced with titles such as Perpetual Bliss, High & Low, and On A Quest. As she states “When the layers overlap again and again, the painting becomes the unity of the interlock of the space and time from my various ideas, eventually they become a record of their own making.” 

Born in 1976, Yangyang Pan studied at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute where she received her Honours Bachelor of Arts in 1998 followed by her Master of Fine Art in 2002. She remained as an instructor until 2006 when she relocated to Canada. Since 2006, Pan has exhibited internationally, including Canada, USA, Italy and China. Her work is widely collected in numerous private and public institutions such as Government of Ontario Art Collection, Apple (USA), The Rochester Museum of Fine Art (USA), The Sichuan Fine Art Institute (China) and retail giants including Holt Renfrew (Canada) and Anthropologie (USA).