Yafeng DuanForm of the Formless

The most important thing in painting is to switch off one’s head and let oneself be guided, says the German-Chinese painter Yafeng Duan, who was born in Hebei in 1973 and lives in Berlin today. How do the colours participate, how do canvas and paper behave, where does the brush lead the hand? Light and dense, bright and dark, inner and outer world, broad brushwork and fine lines in the tradition of ink painting, resistance and flow, massive planes and floating colours. All of this, Duan continues, also corresponds to the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. To this is added chance, which can be brought into play without esoteric connotations, as for instance in the case of John Cage’s compositional technique, which drew on the “I Ching” as a structuring principle. Notions of form are therefore always bound up with questions of procedure as well: how does chance influence the work, how much chance does the work benefit from? Deriving from Taoism, the principles of yin and yang are then almost inevitably invoked. Originally these terms stood for the “darkness on the southern bank of the river,” for a “shady place” (yin) and, conversely, for the “radiance of the sun, the sunny rise on the southern side of the mountains” (yang). Of Yafeng Duan’s abstract painting it is accordingly said that she creates spaces which only open up on longer contemplation, that not all of them will endure, and that some rather deform or even dissolve altogether.

Exhibition:
Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, 27/1 – 18/3/2023