Luan Xueyan: void with wind brings together the artist's 13 installations united by an essential, deeply affective medium: fiber. Luan Xueyan considers fiber as a portal, the finest available opening through which dialogue and retrospection are set in motion, through which the various works in this series are woven and laced into an exquisite web of sensitivity and memory.

The series began in 2012 with an act of collection: used garments, each one belonging to someone holding significant meaning to the artist's life, each one carrying the residue of time which she "couldn't bear to let go." Working with labor-intensive hand sewing, Luan takes up the needle as one takes up a method of inquiry, pressing into the fabric's texture in search of what resists articulation: the tribulations wedged inside life's fissures and crevices where light does not reach. Fiber, the material that forms the first layer between the skin and the world, accommodates the body warmth and memory that defines intimacy, holds the cavity for the body to inhabit, and reflects the framework of the times in which it was worn and kept and mourned over. It gives expression to the artist's intent to meet with reality's hard shell with gentleness and nurture, and to give each individual life tender, unhurried care. For this exhibition, Luan once again invites her kith and kin to contribute objects that speak most truthfully to where they find themselves now, continuing her writing of a connection that spans time and space.

In the exhibition space, the artist unfurls an aesthetic awareness and compositional logic she has developed from her years of training in traditional Chinese painting. The gallery space then becomes a boundless expanse of flowing river. The works hover above the horizon line, each one catching and returning the silhouette of the others, suspended in a shifting atmosphere of sunlight and moisture. Viewers approach from the north bluff, "looking out" across the water; they take in the whole from a distance, as one "surveys a landscape before entering it"; then they cross, moving from the south bank into the galleries themselves, and the installations receive them. A grid system has been introduced into the exhibition design as an invisible measure. Human figures move through this space like coordinates gravitating towards the edges of the grid, their trajectories tracing paths across a field that has been, as if by an unseen hand, artificially smoothed and leveled into perfect equality. A dialogue that requires no preset laws is ready to start.

Human figures are conspicuously absent from the exhibition. Rather, they hide within the folds of obsolete garments, or between lines of handsewn stitches. As viewers move through the space, piloting their own bodies past the works, the garments respond: quivering, fluttering, stirring at the edges as if roused by the proximity of the living. Each encounter between viewer and work is registered this way. Soft whisper and iridescent glitter—these are the language void with wind chooses to speak, in order to demonstrate its lightness and bubbliness. The seemingly disorderly hung works carry with them secret leads: rough selvedges and threads scattered besides patches of silk clothes are printed with QR codes; wings painted on silk press eagerly forward from beneath skirt hems…. Nothing here feels grafted or sewn. They almost seem to have grown organically from the object itself. The lightness, the bubbliness, and their delicacy of the details are like a microscopic yet dense resistance that refuses to stop asserting its strength within slow and nearly indiscernible frictions.

"Wind" is antonymous to stability. It is an entity that oscillates and drifts between the solid ground and the atmospheric ring, neither fully of the earth nor fully of the air, implying the uncertainty of shifting perceptions. When this critical state is pushed to the point of "void," vision ceases to be a mechanism of visual representation and becomes instead an integral binding force that holds the world together from inside and, in holding it, dictates its terms. In the same vein, the established hierarchies and conflicts dissolve. Lightness and weight, nearness and distance are redistributed in a state of continuous, reciprocal gravity. This web of sensitivity and memory, woven from fiber, used garments, from objects still in use and lives still in motion, continues to unfold in a collective outward gaze.

Luan Xueyan: void with wind is the artist's first institutional solo exhibition, co-curated by MACA Assistant Curator Zhou Chu, and MACA Associate Curator Yang Li.

About the Artist
 

Luan Xueyan

Luan Xueyan (b.1973, Liaoning) BA & MA in 1998 at the Department of Chinese Meticulous Figurative Painting, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China. MA in 2009 at the Visual Arts Department of Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, Italy. Graduated summa cum laude. Currently lives and works in Beijing.