Yafeng Duan: Form of the Formless

How does chance influence the work?

The most important thing when painting is to switch off your head and let yourself be guided, says the German-Chinese painter Yafeng Duan, who was born in Hebei in 1973 and now lives in Berlin. How do the colours participate, how do the canvas and paper behave, where does the brush lead the hand? Light and dense, light and dark, inner and outer world, broad brushstrokes and fine lines in the tradition of ink painting, resistance and flow, solid surfaces and floating colours. According to Duan, all of this corresponds to the rhythm of breathing in and out. Added to this is chance, which can be brought into play without esoteric connotations, as in the case of John Cage's compositional technique, for example, which utilised the "I Ching" as a structuring principle. Ideas of form are therefore always linked to questions of process: How does chance influence the work, how much chance is good for it? Coming from Taoism, the principles of yin and yang are then almost inevitably invoked. Originally, these terms stood for the "darkness on the south bank of the river", for a "shady place" (yin) or, in contrast to this, for the "radiance of the sun, the sunny hill on the south side of the mountains" (yang). Yafeng Duan's abstract painting is also said to create spaces that can only be opened up after a longer period of observation; not all of them would remain, some would deform or even dissolve completely.

Exhibition:
Gallery Michael Janssen, Berlin, 27/1 - 18/3/2023