Yuxiao Ran
Trash
Oil on Calico, 75cm x 75cm, 2022.
Ignorance Buried Here
Oil on Calico, 135cm x 90cm, 2022.
STATEMENT
My paintings are a record, or a re-creation of my present experience. I primarily use representational language to arrange images and motifs from different cultural spaces and times on the canvas. This “collage-like” visual arrangement is never precomposed – I seldom make sketches for my paintings. I value this spontaneous way of working because it makes up my “present,” even though these “presents” often point to things from the past.
As the images slowly pile up on the canvas, the temporal and spatial identity they originally carried become less important. By extracting the pictorial language from their original contexts, I want to use a playful way to challenge, question, and subvert our habitual reading of images and symbols. Undoubtedly, this way of creation produces chaos and a lack of logical sense, but for me, this chaos is just the kind of realism that I experience in the contemporary social environment(s). Human nature dictates that we tend to favor pattern over randomness, which ensures the order we experience in our daily lives. Won’t it be extremely disappointing and dull if painting also has to submit to this inertia of ours?