Artist: Lin Yan
Booth: 1D46
Exhibition Duration:19.05 – 23.05.2021
Venue: Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
Since the establishment in 2008, Leo Gallery has been a progressive force in nurturing young and representing established contemporary artists regardless of nationality. This year, the gallery will bring Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Lin Yan’s solo exhibition “Lin Yan: No Return” to Art Basel in Hong Kong.
Lin Yan is internationally recognised for her site-specific installations, sculptures, and two-dimensional works made of various Chinese handmade paper. In the past decade, Lin has been employing Xuan paper to bring out the essence, depth, and complexities of this traditional medium, particularly to illustrate its associated Eastern aesthetics and philosophy in the contemporary context. The diverse representations of materiality are of paramount importance for the artist. Lin’s meditative works poetically reveal the textural and painterly qualities of her creative process by crumbling, folding, layering, mounting, and casting the Xuan paper, and often executed either without colour or with dark ink.
In early 2017, the artist started to create a new series named after the Big Dipper called Regeneration of Hope. The works are presented as site-specific installations and are located in various cities globally, commenting on the everlasting global warming and environmental deterioration. Life and death have become an eerily intimate topic during the trying times of the worldwide pandemic. It is in this vein that Lin creates the installation “Megrez II -No Return” (2021), which depicts the essential components of the living ecosystem as well as the unity between nature, humanity, and the universe. Therefore, Lin’s work opens a contemplative portal for the viewer to delve into the world of inner peace by appreciating its splendid imagery, structure, and lyricism.
