UCCA is honored to host Yu Hong for this edition of the CuratedBy Series. She has picked two aspiring young female artists who articulate a rare feminine perspective on the happenstance of today’s world. Both Yuan Yuan and Pan Lin integrate a fascinating use of material with a delicacy of production to express the youngest underpinnings of the emerging contemporary Chinese art aesthetic.

Jérôme Sans, UCCA Director

Pan Lin

Nearly everyone is born into a world where they are constantly watching; seeing all they are able to see, all they want to see, all that they can’t help but see. And yet there are many who still desire to see that which is inappropriate, that which should not be viewed, that which is impossible to see. Those uncertain and ambiguous sights are somehow mysterious and enchanting. Pan Lin is captivated by reflected images in rearview mirrors. The age of the automobile has changed how we become accustomed to viewing things. The moving rearview mirror unexpectedly catches the complicated, confusing, fragmented and chaotic; and seemingly reflects our lives. Pan
Lin takes several reflections, these apparently unrelated scenes full of metaphors, and paints them on rearview mirrors. In this evasive viewing, a mixture of truths and falsehoods are spied upon, and all images are recorded backwards in the mirrors. In this kind of repeated spying and recording, we seem to be wandering between the heart of the city and the periphery, wandering between the disputes of the mind and the unreconciled. Pan Lin uses her keen mind and confidence to transform life in an ordinary rearview mirror into a soulful medium, reflecting her inner most feelings and our interlinked restlessness and suspicions.

Yuan Yuan

When the glamorous Japanese and Korean celebrities enter the hearts of young girls, their admirers often take pictures of themselves in an attempt to impersonate these favored celebrities. When they virtually approach theirself image like this, these young girls are able topossess the perfectly long legs, pink lips and long eyelashes of glamorous celebrities. They then satisfy themselves by sharing their photos online, voluntarily submitting their “photos” to publicopinion; fittingly they become adored overnightinternet sensations. When this virtual satisfaction begins to serve as a harmless lubricant of social life, are these girls happy? Do they really believe in this virtual beauty? Yuan Yuan uses ardently fresh brushstrokes to capture such glossy beauty inside fragile crystalclear globes, filling them with the image of fashionably oblivious pretty girls. Self-confident and comfortable, their beauty and calm manner are like fragile bubbles, forming and dissolving in the blink of an eye. The girls are painted as water droplets adhering to the gentle scenery of this interior space. This exceptional manmade fairyland, stretching white with warmth and grace, invites viewers to step beyond individual circumstance and unease in this rapidly changing society and to sigh at the achievement of such youthfully romantic extravagance. Yuan Yuan employ s her thought ful visual expression to bear witness to the invincibility and helplessness of youth within today’s world.

Yu Hong, Guest Curator