Renqian Yang

Sounds of the Ephemeral

Apr. 3–Jun.6, 2021

Curator: Lynn Hai

Attempting to touch commonly-shared basic feelings by working on the material ceramic as the medium and colors as the method, Renqian Yang has continuously studied and explored human’s subtle emotions, sentimental moments and fleeting inspirations in our everyday lives, and let them stay and flow from her hands, then grow into grotesque blossoms or sprawls.

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Consciousness Utopia

2021

Colored porcelain paper clay with glaze

55 pieces in total, various dimensions

$7,000

Symbiosis

2021

Colored porcelain paper clay with glaze

9 x 12 x 8.5 inches

$1,500

*Symbiosis

Living together, social life; Association of two different organisms which live attached to each other, or one as a tenant of the other, and contribute to each other's support. Also more widely, any intimate association of two or more different organisms, whether mutually beneficial or not.

— Oxford English Dictionary

Dolce Far Niente

2021

Colored porcelain paper clay with glaze

8 x 8.5 x 8.5 inches

$1,200

SOLD

*Dolce Far Niente

The pleasure of doing nothing.

— The Book of Human Emotions

Pleasant relaxation in carefree idleness.

— Merriam-webster

Renqian Yang’s art practice also extends to painting. On a canvas, her experiments of colors are more audacious and unshackled. Her paintings show signs of influences from abstract expressionism and its related styles, standing as a reflection of her individual psyche tapping into universal senses. With a busy composition and dizzying color strokes, her latest large-scale painting Radiant Splendor shows two spontaneous inclinations that can be found in most of her works: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on open fields of color.

Pitter-patter

2021

Acrylic on Canvas

30 x 40 inches

$3,500

Radiant Splendor

2021

Acrylic on Canvas

30 x 40 inches

$3,500

Yang has long been interested in binaries. Her signature works express the sense of freeness and fluidity through a hard and brittle material — ceramic. In her creation, she wanders through opposite extremes of things and sparks new scintillations by juxtaposing, combining or counterposing contrasts of things. The representations of her works always appear to be a state that is flowing, sprawling, spreading and diffusing.

Rejuvenate

2021

Acrylic on Wood

8 x 8 inches

$700

Morii

2021

Colored porcelain paper clay with glaze

19 x 8.5 x 12.75 inches

$2,000

*Morii

The desire to capture a fleeting moment. If you think of every moment as another step on the long path to forgetting everything, a snapshot is a gate on that journey, a vibrant acknowledgement that something has changed.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Plume

2021

Acrylic on Wood

9 x 12 inches

$800

Lutalica

2021

Colored stoneware, porcelain paper clay with glaze,

11.5 x 18 x 10 inches

$2,000

*Lutalica

The Part of Your Identity That Doesn't Fit Into Categories. When you were born they put you in a little box and slapped a label on it. But if we begin to notice these categories no longer fit us, maybe it’ll mean that we’ve finally arrived—just unpacking the boxes, making ourselves at home.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Although the sprawling forms and dribbles of colors in Renqian Yang’s ceramic works sometimes evoke an impression of splashing water or flowing streams, there’s never any symbolic figure that can be designated to a specific motivation or inspiration in her creation. Renqian Yang focuses on a more abstract level of depicting and conveying various feelings shared by humans — “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on” (Mark Rothko).

Rao

2021

Acrylic on Wood

9 x 12 inches

$800

Emerald

2021

Acrylic on Wood

9 x 12 inches

$800

Tenacious

2021

Colored stoneware paper clay with glaze

19.5 x 10.5 x 9 inches

$2,000

Monachopsis

2021

Acrylic on Canvas

10 x 10 inches

$800

*Monachopsis

The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Paranoia

2021

Acrylic on Canvas

10 x 10 inches

$800

*Paranoia

Those who were unduly suspicious, or quick to assume others were trying to undermine or humiliate them, were called paranoid.

— The Book of Human Emotions

Resonant Void

2021

Colored porcelain paper clay with glaze,

13.5 x 13 x 12 inches

$1,800

Klexos

2021

Colored paper clay with glaze

12 Tiles, 4 x 4 inches each

$3,500

*Klexos

There are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret. A kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, and fill out the picture; to keep the memory alive, and not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Hwyl

2021

Acrylic on Wood

8 x 8 inches

$700

*Hwyl

Literally the word for a boat sail, hwyl is a wonderfully onomatopoeic Welch word that means exuberance or excitement...Used to describe flashes of inspiration, a singer’s gusto or raised spirits at parties…

— The Book of Human Emotions

Shadow Remnant

2021

Acrylic on Wood

8 x 8 inches

$700

2021

Acrylic on Wood

8 x 8 inches

$700

Sonder

2021

Colored porcelain paper clay with glaze

16 x 11 x 10 inches

$2,000

*Sonder

The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Huff

2021

Acrylic on Wood

8 x 8 inches

$700

*Huff

Since the mid-eighteen century, feeling huff or huffed-and later being ‘in a huff’-was to be swept up into a windy swell of petulance as a result of a real or imagined insult. Feeling puffed up with PRIDE and ANGER was an important part of it.

— The Book of Human Emotions

Mudita

2021

Acrylic on Wood

8 x 8 inches

$700

*Mudita

For Gautama Buddha, who lived in the fifth or sixth century BCE, joy was not a scarce resource to be competed over, or parceled out to only a lucky few...For him the word mudita captured an experience of JOY, rather than ENVY or RESENTMENT, on hearing of someone else’s good fortune.

— The Book of Human Emotions