西岸 | WEST BUND

Yuz Project Room I

2015.09.01 - 10.11

Exhibition

	2015.09.01 Tuesday - 10.11 Sunday

Dates	2015.9.1-10.11
Opening	2015.8.27
Venue	Yuz Museum
Artist	Huang Yuxing, Secundino Hernández

Yuz Museum will present the first series exhibitions for the Yuz Museum Project Room in September 2015. This ongoing project invites artists to make site-specific works or projects, engaging boldly with the museum, its surroundings and its audience, focusing on the present and development of contemporary art, and exploring possibilities in contemporary art.

Huang Yuxing: Liquidus

Commissioned by Yuz Museum, the artist Huang Yuxing will create his artwork based on the space of the museum’s new Project Room. After eight months creating on a 3 x 10.5 meter canvas without preconceived ideas of theme or style, Huang Yuxing, the first domestic artist to present artwork in Yuz Project Room, will unveil his project on August 27th, 2015.

The title Liquidus in this exhibition derives from the scientific term for the temperature at which substances begin to freely flow as liquids. The substances in the paintings melt and hover in the weightless space. The bubbles seem like blood, water drops, emulsions, metals, and synthetic chemicals stacking across the canvas. This series of works, which Huang Yuxing describes as “bubbles,” was born out of the ideas “rivers” and “eddies,” in which the artist has been immersed for a long time. Bubbles in a rushing river, bubbles from churning eddies, and bubbles rising from the bottom of riverbed are all expressed as the excitement and jubilation of newly fluid substances. The “bubbles” are about vanishment; their momentary existence is always facing eternity. Starting from a micro-perspective, the work embodies the life experience of an individual human being in the world of substance.

This large artwork was created without a sketch or study. In his approach to painting, Huang Yuxing begins by dividing the canvas by long and straight lines. Through many thin layers of paint, he lets the bubbles and liquid drops of all sizes, textures and colors form randomly and grow freely in the space. He applies a large amount of symbolized transparent pure color on the canvas to establish the weightless substantive world. As the title of the exhibition Liquidus demonstrates, the artist endows the substance with the essential temperature to make the whole world erupt in “revelry.”

The creative features that Huang Yuxing pursues are the experience and expressionism of painting. Thus, he is always faithful to the life experience of the individual. He emphasizes the self-consciousness of painting and uses various visual approaches to express his inner feelings. In his early works, the relation between “human beings” and “nature” were a very crucial theme and thread. The things he painted, such as black bodies, scattered organs and dim scenes, expressed the artist’s strong emotional strength in an extremely intimate language. In the past five years, new subject matter that formed through lengthy accumulation, such as rivers, woods, bubbles, and treasure, show how the artist responds to the macroscopic world. His creation changes linearly, lying between reality and abstraction, joy and depression, and wandering at the edge of different dimensions of the world.

Secundino Hernández/Entre Primavera y Verano

Deeply influenced by the tradition of European paintings and the development of modern and contemporary art, Spanish artist Secundino Hernández creates works rooted in his wide knowledge of art history and painting experience. He skillfully combines expressionism and abstraction in his paintings, employing a strong and fluent use of line and colour. Hernández applies various techniques, including washing, scraping and working directly from paint tubes onto the canvas. His protean works displaythe triumphs and strugglesof his artistic practice, while emphasisingthe tension between beauty and destruction.

In this project, Hernández chose to use the Yuz Museum’s Glass Foyerwith its vast dimensions and natural light, in which he is exhibitinga group of four monumental paintings measuring 5.5 × 3 metres each, entitled Four Seasons Between Spring and Summer. These works address the change of seasons, and encourage the audience to enterthe artist’s visual cosmos and engage with the depiction of time and space. Hernández’slarge works encourage engagement from different angles.

The exhibition also featuresmore modestly-sized paintings. These works will be exhibited in Project Room 1F, and will provide a better understanding of Hernández’s visual language and versatility.This is the artist’s first exhibition in China and demonstrates his transformation and integration of different aesthetics from the West and the East.

About Artist

Huang Yuxing

Huang Yuxing was born in 1975 in Beijing. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts Mural Department in 2000, and currently lives and works in Beijing. His major exhibitions include: The River’s Gobbled up Trees and He’ll Swallow You Next. (Antenna Space, Shanghai, China, 2014); Flame and the Sea: Gao Weigang, Huang Yuxing and Ouyang Chun (Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong, China, 2013); Le cours d’un fleuve (Galerie Paul Frèches, Paris, France, 2013); Huang Yuxing (Beijing Commune, Beijing, China, 2012); Jardin des révolutionnaires (Galerie Paul Frèches, Paris, France,2012); Light – Huang Yuxing’s Drawing Exhibition (Star Gallery, Beijing, China/Red Bridge Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2010); Looking for Me (Minsheng Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, 2008); and Hole (Star Gallery, Beijing, China, 2007).

About Yuz Project Room

Secundino Hernández

Secundino Hernández was born in 1975 in Madrid, Spain, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Complutense University, Madrid in 2000. He currently lives and works in Madrid and Berlin. Hehas recently had solo exhibitions at GaleriaMúriasCenteno, Lisbon, Portugal (2015); Maison Louis Carré, Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, France (2014); Victoria Miro, London, UK (2014); GalerieKrinzinger, Vienna, Austria (2007, 2010, 2014); GalerieForsblom, Helsinki, Finland (2010, 2014); Galería Heinrich Ehrhardt, Madrid, Spain (2006, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015) and GalerieBärbelGrässlin, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2013).

About Yuz Project Room

Yuz Project Room is a new independent exhibition program at theYuzMuseum which opens to the public in September 2015. Yuz Project Room invites artists to make site-specific works or projects, engaging boldly with the museum, its surroundings and its audience. Combining “project + exhibition,” the artist interacts actively with the space and aims to present the moment when contemporary art occurs.

Yuz Project Room is the place where innovation, invention, and new movements happen in the trajectory of an artist. It aims to provide another platform for Chinese and international artists to exhibit their artworks as well as more opportunities to communicate with each other. Yuz Project Room invites the artist to get inspired with new ideas by engaging with the museum space and attempting to create breakthrough artworks that diverge from the artist’s accustomed path.