Yanyan Huang – El Baile

22 September — 03 November 2018

Jelato Love is pleased to present ‘El Baile’ the first solo exhibition in Spain of Yanyan Huang, born Sichuan, China, lives in Beijing, New York, and California.

The exhibition title, translated from Spanish as ‘The Dance’, refers to her unified theory of art, a totality only perceptible in fragments, that considers forms as actions in an ongoing performance.

Contained within each of her artworks are various reference points from her multi-layered, tradition-bound cultural training, including painting, calligraphy, classical music, and ballet, as well as Internet-based video performance, where each vein embodies a distillation of a grander interconnected, but perpetually incomplete work.

In Huang’s work, interconnectedness is crucial, each brush stroke mirroring a practice that echoes her early piano training – from the age of seven Huang practiced piano two hours each day, and her prodigious talent led her to win competitions and perform with the Utah Symphony at age eleven – to paint: Huang practices thousands of compositions and gestures with ink or color on paper, training her muscle memory, so when time comes to apply paint to canvas the marks come out fluidly and naturally as in a performance.

If one reduces the understanding of performance to a gesture, and think of every gesture as being active in a grand life theatre, an important component of Huang’s practice emerges again: that of interconnection. In her own words “different fields of study – music, dance, martial arts, astronomy – while superficially disparate, all have parallels and are all essentially interconnected”. Nothing is singular or pure, and it is this essence which so perfectly connects a contemporary practice to ancient Chinese philosophy that is subtly but wholly present in Huang’s oeuvre. 

“Painting and calligraphy are closely related to qigong (‘Life Energy Cultivation’) breathing exercises, and the martial arts, the physical act of creation is itself a healthy form of exercise that nourishes one’s qi (ch’i) energy.” – Qiu XhiJie

Yanyan Huang was born in Sichuan, China in 1988, lives in Beijing, California, and New York. 

Solo shows include: De Sarthe, Hong Kong, and BANK Gallery, Shanghai (both forthcoming), Cloud Tempo at Salt Projects (Beijing, CN, 2017), Nebbia del Tempo at Ibid (Los Angeles, 2017), Giardino del Tempo at Tomorrow Gallery (New York, NY, 2016) and Ex Silentio at CURA’s Basement Roma (Rome, Italy, 2016). Group exhibitions include, Hidden Words at Gallery Vacancy (Shanghai, (N, 2018), After Effect “Vapegoat Rising,” Arturo Bandini at Ballroom Marfa (2016) and Windoes at The Composing Rooms (Berlin, DE 2015).

Huang’s artworks are in the collections of Zhang Enli, Dominic Ng (CEO of East West Bank), Susan and Michael Hort, Paul and Anissa Boudjakdji Balson, Mathieu Borysevicz, and others.