Yuan Fang

Fang’s process is rooted in both layering and interruption. Oil is applied thickly, then dragged back with a palette knife; passages are obscured with new pigment, while others are left raw, exposing the canvas beneath. The surfaces bear the scars of this back-and-forth, scratches, ridges, translucent veils of color that suggest time compressed into matter. In places, a sudden streak of green cuts through burgundy like a wound reopening; elsewhere, violet drips trickle downward, slowing into pools at the base of the canvas. These interruptions prevent the paintings from becoming too resolved, keeping them in a state of tension, as though they are always in the act of becoming.

Curves dominate her compositions. They bend and swell into muscular arcs that evoke the body without depicting it directly, the twist of an organ, the curve of a shoulder, the pulse of tissue beneath skin. The palette intensifies this effect: deep burgundies throb against the cooler greens, while flashes of violet lend a bruised luminosity. Seen together, the canvases oscillate between violence and tenderness, contraction and release. 

This corporeal resonance acquires further weight when considered against Fang’s recent experience with breast cancer. The works are not illustrations of illness, nor do they announce biography overtly. Instead, they register the rhythms of survival, the push and pull of treatment and recovery, the interruptions of the body’s own time. The scraping and layering, the ruptures and repairs, carry an undercurrent of resilience: painting here becomes both a method of expression and a way of holding together fragments, an insistence on presence amid uncertainty.

The exhibition also situates Fang within a larger conversation about contemporary abstraction. Her practice draws from both Eastern and Western traditions while resisting simple categorization, weaving together the gestural legacy of Abstract Expressionism with philosophical approaches to emptiness and space from Chinese art. This cross-cultural dialogue becomes visible in the oscillation between intensity and stillness, movement and pause. By inhabiting this in-between space, Fang carves out a language that feels deeply personal yet resonant across traditions, neither bound to heritage nor divorced from it.