YANGYANG PAN: East Meets West in Contemporary Abstraction

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Art Exhibition:  YANGYANG PAN:  East Meets West in Contemporary Abstraction
Date:                  Sept. 16– Oct. 29, 2016

Location:           37 Popham Rd, Scarsdale NY  10583

Artist:                 Yangyang Pan

Opening Reception, Friday Sept. 16, from 6-8:00 pm

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is delighted to announce YANGYANG PAN: East Meets West in Contemporary Abstraction, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Chinese/Canadian artist Yangyang Pan.  The exhibition includes 17 oil paintings on raw linen, created in the past 2 years, which embody the artist’s signature spontaneous, celebratory, and sensitive style.  This will be Yangyang Pan’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.  The opening reception will take place on Friday Sept 16, from 6-8 PM and is open to the public.

Yangyang Pan’s large scale abstract paintings express the artist’s personal journey, cultural connections and aesthetic ideas.  While ostensibly based on the dynamic visual forces of nature, these lyrical works are as much a landscape of Pan’s inner emotions, memories and history. 

Says Pan: “I had a trip to China at the end of 2014, and it had been 6 years since my last trip.  I was shocked by the huge change in my hometown Chongqing.  The city had developed so quickly, strange but familiar.  I was excited for these modern changes of the city, but on the other hand, I missed what trees and seasons smelled like in the past.  The memory of odors was very rich.  For many months thereafter, I let my mind wonder, to sense something I have the passion to paint.  These paintings were the result.” 

Pan’s paintings are created through an intuitive, spontaneous process beginning with her choice of palette, generally composed of bright and optimistic colors, exaggerations of those observed in nature.  Laying down marks instinctually, Pan builds the surface over time, playing with thick and thin, varying strokes, while reacting to active and pleasant visual vibrations of paint against the raw linen.  Each layer is a captured moment, the expressive gesture and activity reflected on its surface.  Over time, the interlocking layers coalesce, creating a balanced, homogenous, and unified record of her emotional intensity.

The paintings’ titles provide visual cues to places in Pan’s memories.  In Mountain Music, Under the Lemon Tree, and Wilderness, to name a few, floating, cloud-like clusters of thick paint give visual form and movement to the landscapes imagined in Pan’s sensual abstractions.  Ethereal ribbon-like passages wrestle with strokes that abruptly stop and balance against broad open areas; at other times, strokes are crammed, in bold, lyrical spaces. 

Yangyang Pan’s paintings, far more layered than those of the past, are a true fusion of Eastern and Western traditions.  Pan, who is born and educated in China, credits Ma Yuan, the important Chinese landscape painter from the Song dynasty, known for his "one-corner" composition, as an influence.  A painter in the shen shui tradition of pen and ink landscape painting, the intent is to capture an awareness of inner reality and wholeness, as though the painting flows directly from the artist’s mind, through the brush, onto the paper.  Pan’s affinity for the work of American Abstract Expressionist painters Joan Mitchell, and Willem deKooning is also apparent.  Like her mentors, Pan has the ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint.  She has forged a vocabulary completely her own -- a unique blend of idea, desire and talent, emblematic of the global nature of art of our time.

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art, located in Scarsdale, NY is a fine art gallery focusing on 20^th and 21^stc art.  Founded in 2001, MJFA has provided an open and friendly space for clients to discuss and view fresh, new work.  The gallery mounts six annual exhibitions, handles the acquisition and resale of significant works by modern and contemporary artists, builds collections, and sources art for commercial and residential projects.