Illuminations: Yafeng Duan

Gow Langsford Gallery is pleased to present Illuminations by Yafeng Duan. This is Duan’s inaugural exhibition with Gow Langsford, and her first solo show in Aotearoa. Duan works in abstract painting, combining gestural mark-making with multi-layered paint washes. Her paintings are richly colourful and expressive, drawing on influences from both traditional Chinese ink painting and contemporary Western abstract art.

Illuminations is comprised of new, large-scale works, which showcase Duan’s distinctively vibrant palette and deft handling of paint. Her works are characterised by overlayed washes, paint runs, and occasional bright shocks of colour. These paintings operate in a mode of abstraction where gesture, tone and contrast are the central elements, rather than image and illusory depth. This could infer a response or reference to Abstract Expressionism, although this is only part of the contextual framework they operate within. Duan’s paintings read as contemporary and attuned to the nuances of global digital audiences. While they are aesthetically reminiscent of Ab-Ex, they are of an altogether different era. 

The gestural marks in Duan’s paintings have a poetic quality, though what they convey is non-verbal, visceral, and subjective. This is a type of communication distinct to painting, wherein the artwork becomes a conduit between the artist and the viewer. Though it is also a still space, allowing the viewers own reflective contemplation, rather than asserting a particular meaning. This meditative quality arises from the intuitive way Duan approaches painting, and the cross-cultural artistic background that has informed her work.

Duan was born in Hebei in Northern China in 1973, and her father was a notable figure in traditional Chinese ink painting. She studied this traditional artform at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing from 1999 – 2001. After moving to Germany in 2004, she studied painting at Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences and then undertook an extended period of study at Bauhaus University Weimar, graduating in 2011.

This combination of Eastern and Western training has informed her approach to painting. Writer Karina Abdusalamova states, “Soulfulness is an intrinsic quality of Yafeng Duan’s art. By experimenting with the inherent aesthetic potential of nature, she intuitively creates an inner world of shapes and textures —a mental space where time is frozen and gravity is suspended, a place that allows the viewer to reconnect and breathe.”^[1] This intuitive, meditative approach appears in the work as splashes of colour, gestural marks, and paint layering that neither suggests nor negates visual depth. Through these works, one can interpret universal themes such as creative void, yin and yang/darkness and light, temporality, flow and transformation. These themes and qualities are opened up by the works presented in Illuminations.

Yafeng Duan has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries in Germany and China, including notable venues such as the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, Neues Museum in Weimar, Galerie Rothamel in Erfurt, and Alexander Ochs Private Berlin, and Hebei Museum in Shijiazhuang. Illuminations is her first exhibition with Gow Langsford Gallery.

[1] Karina Abdusamalova, Form of the Formless, Gallery Michael Janssen exhibition text.