Click Ten 新展预告｜惊梦：潜性之象

As the Chinese New Year is approaching, to celebrate this traditional festival, Click Ten Art Space is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “Unanticipated Dream: Latent Image” by the young artist Yifan Jiang, in an attempt to interpret the surging “spring” tide with the youthful vitality of art. The opening reception will be held at 3pm on January 7, 2023 at Click Ten Art Space. Bofan Chen is the curator.

“Unanticipated Dream” takes the title of the tenth scene of the Peony Pavilion by Tang Xian Zu, the great Ming Dynasty playwright. The script parallels the objective scenery with the characters’ state of mind as comparative references, to depict the inner communication between the subject and the object and ends with a “poetic” unexpected surprise. The spirit of Jiang’s works is in line with the real fantasy of the Peony Pavilion. The symbolic elements of poetry, genealogy, dreams and individual experiences are presented in the form of imagery and dramatic narrative expression. Therefore, Jiang’s works visually present a historical path tracing the expression of collective subconsciousness, while the artist’s personal experience is overall constructed by the traditional painting language but weaves scenes in the space theater with contemporary emotional expression.

The “latent image” is a rational footnote for Jiang’s works from the perspective of psychoanalysis. By means of images, the artist bridges the romantic classic of more than 400 years ago and contemporary emotions through “dreams”, while the blank faces become the semantic blank backstage where each viewer embeds the subjective outlook, explaining the narrative in the space from individual and historical experience, and telling the different understanding of time between individual emotion and historical memory. Through poetic romance and the necessary non-logical construction, Jiang subjectivizes the objects. Whether they are streams, grasses, or white horses and dragonflies, they are given the possibility to be interpreted across time. Meanwhile, the objective physical boundary between the figures inside and outside of the painting is blurred.

The exhibition is entitled “Unanticipated Dream: Latent Image”, which points to the roots of the cultural lineage of the artist’s creation, highlighting the cultural vitality of vestiges of the classic in the contemporary context. On the other hand, it takes contemporary psychoanalysis and “poetic” images as the entry point to underscore the transformability of “identity”. In the compound context, the artist Yifan Jiang’s creation presents a different way of preserving “tradition” in contemporary cultural slices in a “subconscious” and constructive tone, with “samples” presenting a new possibility of bridging the history and future. At the year-end, Click Ten Art Space returns to the contextual memory of cultural tradition with Yifan Jiang’s elegant theatrical narrative, longing for an auspicious dream of spring in the sound of firecrackers…

Young Chinese curator, independent art writer；Born in 1995 in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China.Graduated with a master’s degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from the New Academy of Fine Arts (NABA), Milan, Italy.Studied under Marco Scotini, a renowned Italian curator.

Bofan Chen’s curatorial logic mostly takes the uniqueness of the community as the starting point to probe the possibilities of new art and tries to reorganize the development logic of international emerging art in a critical approach in his curating and writing, while effectively connecting his practice with contemporary reality via exhibitions, to reveal the symbiotic power between emerging art and social development.