Unintended Presentation
Yang Peilin Solo Exhibition

Preface

For nearly 20 years, Yang Peilin has been living at the foot of Siming Mountain in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, experiencing and thinking about the world in a minimalist way of life. This is his first solo exhibition of contemporary ink art works, which presents his cognition and reflections with his unique artistic language and creation methods.

As an artist with a long experience of calligraphy practice, Yang Peilin uses water, ink and rice paper as the main material for his ink experiment. His works - huge in size and intriguing in detail - were created by folding, binding, rolling, rubbing and other methods, each of which generated a visual series. These minimalist movements were repeated in the same dimension, yet presented multidimensional and diverse images in the end, and that is exactly the visual glamour of Yang Peilin's works.

Yang Peilin's works are full of beauty in form, color and line, but what ultimately strikes the viewers is the flow of life therein, which is derived from the material of ink as well as the concepts of Chinese philosophy. The process of his creation embodies the harmony between man and nature. It is simple, so it is pure; it is diverse, so it is infinite. While ink and physical images are just the carriers, Yang Peilin's real work of art is his "impression". The "impression" comes from "nothing", grows together with the "image", and finally merges with the "image" into one.

In recent years, Chinese ink art has taken on a variety of new changes. Artists no longer confine themselves to the traditional barriers, but trace and return to the origin from different perspectives, thereby activate the potential of this ancient medium in the contemporary context. We are more pleased to see that contemporary Chinese artists have begun to perfectly integrate traditional philosophical concepts into their creation, using richer artistic languages to express their experiences and cognition of the world and the truth of life. Yang Peilin is just such an artist.

 Curator, Xu Baicheng