Fierce, untamed painterly gestures surge and reverse, folding into the swirling entanglements of artist Yuan Fang’s abstraction. They develop towards the infinite, then coagulate into energetic nuclei that implode into mass earlier than breaking up once more in multiplying flame-like or tidal actions that echo the expansive and disaggregative forces binding all matter in a perpetual cycle of technology, transformation, decay and rebirth.
In just some years, Fang has change into one of the sought-after names in rising abstraction, first capturing collectors’ consideration in her native China and shortly after throughout the globe. Her heat whirlwind of hand-touched gestures feels each psychologically and bodily participatory, evoking, past figuration, actions and bodily expressions that launch an amazing important power. That power resonated deeply with audiences who, after the lengthy interval of restriction through the pandemic, yearned for renewed bodily connection and sensation. Curiosity in her work surged throughout that point and has endured since. Whereas her public sale file stays $88,900, achieved by Expanse (masks) at Phillips New York in March 2023, her outcomes have stayed constant—significantly in Hong Kong—displaying how her compelling strategy to abstraction continues to interact collectors past passing traits. Final 12 months, the artist joined Skarstedt, additional cementing her profession with robust worldwide illustration.
The brand new physique of work Fang is at present presenting at Skarstedt Chelsea marks a shift. They carry a unique depth born from the visceral, hard-won consciousness of the boundaries in that perpetual battle between physique and spirit, the transience of flesh and the infinite potential of the thoughts. That consciousness emerges most starkly when confronted with the physique’s vulnerability—one thing Fang confronted this 12 months after studying she had most cancers. The result’s a collection of emotionally and psychologically charged works that stage a strenuous battle for resistance and resilience within the face of the entropy that guidelines over our our bodies and our particular person destiny.
Fang’s strategy to the canvas is deeply intuitive, she explains after we meet in her studio. The colourful, freshly completed works—unfold in a circle across the room—had been nonetheless pulsing with power earlier than leaving for the gallery. For Fang, portray is just not about premeditation however about transferring and channeling forces by means of a continuing trade as she navigates the push and pull of the floor. “I feel my course of could be very intuitive as a result of I don’t actually use sketches,” she tells Observer. “For me, portray is nearly like an accident; you uncover what it needs to be as you’re employed on it. The method is about discovering the piece alongside the best way. I like to go away house for the unknown to take over.”
Each one in all Fang’s work begins in a different way. She often begins with a primary movement or a construction she needs to realize, then strikes into the road work. “From there, I add extra layers, and it turns into this ongoing strategy of including and erasing,” she explains. “There’s lots of build up and chopping again in every portray.”
Though the expansive actions of paint appear able to evolving endlessly past any construction, they’re anchored by a graphic basis that guides and orients their movement moderately than corrects or incorporates it. On this course of, virtually like computerized writing, there’s an try to seize invisible forces and the violence of the sensations they spark. Fang is open about the truth that these work are much more visceral than her earlier work, born of a direct confrontation with the physique’s limits and illustration and a fierce struggle for its survival.
“I’d describe these work as deeply visceral: the summary types and shapes typically allude to twisted or fluid variations of the human physique, or to states of emotion,” she says. “I’m involved in how these shapes and layers work together, creating chaotic and turbulent relationships. For me, this turns into a metaphor for the human situation—and for my very own expertise of navigating life on this world.”
Switching from acrylic to grease, with its sensuous density and capability for deep layering, was instrumental for Fang in attaining a brand new vary of sensorial and psychological projection—each of the self and the collective—she needed her work to convey. The longer one seems to be at these works, the extra they appear to shift and breathe, turning into magmatic, residing matter animated with a depth and presence she might by no means have reached with the taut floor of acrylic on canvas.
“Once I was youthful, I needed every thing to occur shortly and intensely. That’s how I’d describe my early acrylic work,” Fang displays. She by no means attended artwork college or frolicked drawing from fashions; to start with, she was merely experimenting, doing many issues directly. Acrylic matched that urgency, drying shortly and aligning along with her want to precise and switch power to the canvas. “As I’ve gotten extra skilled, I’ve began to worth having extra time to consider every layer and what I need to do subsequent. I’ve additionally grown to understand softer rendering, as a result of acrylic’s layers can really feel harsh or tough. That softer strategy feels extra refined, and for me, it creates a really totally different sort of presence within the work.”
But all of the marks appear to curve off the canvas in sweeping arcs, tracing a curvilinear, voluted evolution that finds numerous parallels within the organic world. Ribbon-like types overlap and weave by means of one another, producing a dynamic rhythm throughout the floor.
These curvilinear gestures have change into the anchor of Fang’s visible lexicon, a continuing carried over from her earlier collection. For Fang, the curves embody the feminine physique and feelings. “In comparison with males, ladies typically specific themselves in methods which might be extra oblique, but nonetheless extremely highly effective,” she displays.
Her intention is to convey that whereas ladies could not at all times possess larger bodily power, they maintain emotional, psychological and non secular energy that grounds them and makes them extra resilient. “I need my work to embody that—robust, complicated and stuffed with depth.” Of their muscular stress, resolved in a harmonious dance, these work change into metaphors for feminine power.
Even in her selection of colours, Fang has change into deliberately extra visceral, intentionally evoking the truth of blood and flesh. Her palette strikes by means of wealthy, saturated registers of predominantly crimsons, burgundies and deep plums, punctuated at occasions by flashes of pink and coral earlier than plunging into the depths of blue or the fertile, electrical cost of a deep inexperienced in simply two of the works.
For Fang, the canvas turns into a stage for illustration that strikes past the logic of sensation, searching for as a substitute to channel each the generative and harmful violence of matter. The result’s an unrestrained eruption right into a sensorial and emotional actuality, converging into picture and image. Right here, Fang works with a visible code past language that confronts probably the most primordial human act of affirmation: leaving a mark, drawing a curve that intersects one other till it turns into a logo. It’s a that means that each interprets and transcends the bodily and sensory actuality of notion, opening into the symbolic.
Francis Bacon as soon as described his work as works that “hit instantly the nervous system.” The identical could possibly be mentioned of Fang’s seemingly uncontainable sequences of plasmatic fields that open infinite narrative potentialities, solely to land momentarily within the “matter of truth” earlier than slipping away. The bounds of sensation are surpassed in a number of instructions, however ultimately, the work nonetheless resists chaos—typically hysterically, typically with deep calibration—till type precipitates once more. As with human existence itself, it’s an unintended presence throughout the vastness of the cosmos.
This stress between order and chaos turns into much more compelling when one considers Fang’s use of empty house in these new works. It instantly hyperlinks her, as she acknowledges, to the lengthy custom of Chinese language portray, the place vacancy is just not absence however an area of evocation—a gap the place the invisible and sensually unreachable emerge, revealing interior and outer truths of each the physique and the flux of forces and processes that traverse it.
On this fixed oscillation between type and void, motion and stillness, paint transforms into waves or natural constructions in movement. The invisible—the qi, the important pressure—manifests by means of abstraction, within the picture of a physique contending with its personal materials presence and the possibly infinite expansiveness of the thoughts. It’s inside this house that Fang levels a boundless interaction between embodiment and disembodiment, suggestive of a fluid actuality the place being, feeling and experiencing are all a part of a broader entanglement.
On the identical time, as Fang displays, the empty house round these entanglements is exactly what permits their presence to accentuate. “Leaving extra empty house makes the central determine—or no matter you need to name it—really feel stronger and extra pronounced,” she observes.
For Fang, this concept of void and restraint additionally resonates along with her present situation. “I’ve been present process medical remedy, which makes me tire extra simply and means I don’t have the identical bodily power I used to,” she admits. “Due to that, I needed the work to really feel extra restrained—holding again moderately than pushing with full pressure.”
One portray is a very robust meditation on this psychosomatic state. Dominated by deep blues and vivid reds, its floor is stuffed with interlocking curved shapes that resemble flame-like tongues and layered petals, forming a dense, virtually vortex-like construction. The interaction of cool and heat colours heightens the stress, however at its coronary heart is an intense, energetic core—pulsing like a coronary heart—its crimson mild radiating outward. This warmth appears to develop by means of the work, resisting the cooling tides of blue.
“I consider it as a fireplace,” Fang says as we stand earlier than the portray. “The middle is the chest, radiating mild that appears to light up the entire canvas. However for me, it’s additionally one thing lethal, like most cancers cells rising out of the chest. I needed to seize that duality—the concept that magnificence can carry brutality inside it. That stress between attract and hazard is what makes this piece really feel so highly effective to me.”
In one other work, dominated by vibrant greens and painterly tides of germination, Fang extends this meditation past the person physique to reconnect with nature’s regenerative potential for therapeutic and rebirth—as soon as one reenters these rhythms. The portray unfolds with a rhizomatic power: full of life inexperienced expanses department outward, claiming their generative presence from tides of blood-red, merging in hope for brand spanking new cycles. This piece, she explains, was impressed by a latest journey Upstate, the place she discovered solace and renewal in nature. “It made me take into consideration crops and the human physique as two sorts of residing types. Crops can’t converse or talk with us in the best way individuals do, however they’re nonetheless residing beings that develop and alter,” Fang displays. “That quiet, ongoing development fascinates me.”
Right here, the human presence is both diminished or amplified—expanded into its potential to weave new entanglements and generate sequences of interplay with the exterior world, the identical forces that may make existence not solely extra significant but in addition extra soulful. Fang grew up in Shenzhen, a significant metropolis in China, however one largely with out historic continuity, its previous erased by the relentless tempo of the nation’s accelerated modernization and industrialization. She acknowledges she is just not the sort of Chinese language one that grew up training Buddhism or different conventional customs, but she feels there’s nonetheless an oblique affect in her work. “There’s a Buddhist saying about how every thing is unsure, and I consider that concept has change into my final life philosophy. It’s one thing that additionally comes by means of very instantly in my work.”
On this physique of labor, she unleashes portray’s full potential to metaphorically and symbolically recommend the physique as a fancy entity caught in an unsettled stress between flesh and psyche. Gripped by this pressure, her splaying, swirling shapes twist into sudden twitches and convulsions, urgent in opposition to the boundaries of each physique and thoughts to interrupt into new conceptions of what they may be. The physique is evoked right here as an occasion—a web site the place info occur, the place organs course of substance, the place life pulses, or the place silent toxicity corrodes from inside, imperceptibly. But it stays a residing matter, pulsing and preventing, channeling each final reserve into thriving and asserting its resistance.
Yuan Fang’s “Spaying” opened at Skarsdet on September 4, 2025.
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