Shenzhen-born artist Yuan Fang’s ‘curves’ paintings are sought after by galleries in New York, London, Shanghai and Sydney; now the 28-year-old is coming to Hong Kong to show the works that have mesmerised the art world
Overlapping curved strokes evocative of turbulent winds or oscillating waves, painted in vibrant shades of red, purple and ultramarine with an outburst of energy similar to that of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack, these characteristics have come to be a signature of Yuan Fang’s paintings.
She may have only started her art career in 2018, but the 28-year-old, Shenzhen -born painter has already exhibited around the world: Skarstedt Gallery in London, New York’s Half Gallery, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas, Beijing’s Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Foshan’s He art Museum and Sydney’s Coma Gallery, to name a few. Last year, she became the youngest person to have a solo show at Shanghai’s Long Museum, the largest private museum in mainland China. In 2023, Fang, a graduate of The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, sold a 2022 painting titled Expanse (Mask) for US$88,900 (about HK$700,000). A year later, she made it onto Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 list for her achievements in and influence on the art world.
This month, she is set to head back to Asia to showcase works in Hong Kong. She will exhibit five large-scale oil and acrylic paintings, as well as two drawings on paper, created between 2021 and 2024, at Tatler’s ARTable, an event co-hosted by DBS bank and Tatler celebrating the visual and culinary arts. Later in March, her works will be presented at Art Basel Hong Kong.
“It’ll be a broad range of works. I want to give people a more comprehensive understanding of my practice,” Fang says. “My works are abstract and contain a lot of layers, curved lines and shapes. I want to use the interaction between each layer in the painting to dictate a turbulent, chaotic relationship between them to create a metaphor for the living condition of human being. That’s the whole concept of my art.”
Fang’s style is a far cry from previous generations of Chinese-born, New York-based modern artists, such as Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Zhang Hongtu. Their works are imbued with stories about the Chinese diaspora, memories of the country’s political history or influences of traditional Chinese styles, such as ink art and calligraphy. A mix of eastern and western aesthetics and concepts, their creations offered the western art market in the 1980s and 1990s a glimpse of the Chinese identity.
But Fang, who has been based in New York for the last ten years, decided that she would forge her path a little differently. “I don’t want to brand myself too much as a Chinese artist here, because I’m not really into playing the identity politics game,” she says, referring to how there can sometimes be more focus on a Chinese artist’s heritage than their art.
“In terms of art, I’m like a ‘banana’,” she says, using a colloquialism that refers to someone who is of Asian heritage and had a western-style upbringing. “I had all of my art education outside China. So when I was in Shanghai for Art Week last November, I felt unfamiliar with the setting, artists and galleries. I felt like a foreigner. But when I’m back in New York, I feel like I belong in the art scene here more than when I’m in China.”
Traces of abstract expressionism can be observed in her works, and Fang further draws inspiration from her life and the world around her to create her unique style. “I’m just trying to create a contemporary, new version of abstract paintings,” she says.
The curves are a recurring motif in her work, but that is all she knows she’ll use when she begins. “I don’t start with a sketch; I’m spontaneous and improvise when I paint. There are a lot of unpredictable factors in the process, which I find [reflective of ] the world we’re living in: there are wars going on; and three years ago, there was the pandemic. So we don’t really know what’s going to happen in the future,” she says. “My work conveys these uncertainties.”