胶囊上海｜闫欣悦：重游

闫欣悦：重游 Yan Xinyue: Revisit

展期 Dates: 2024.05.25 - 2024.08.10

开幕 Opening: 2024.05.25 15:00 - 18:00

地址 Address: 胶囊上海，上海徐汇区安福路275弄16号1层

Capsule Shanghai, 1st Floor, Building 16, Anfu Lu 275 Nong, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China

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胶囊上海荣幸呈现闫欣悦（1992年生于中国）在画廊的第二次个展“重游”。展期为2024年5月25日至8月10日。

展览中的画作既唤起一种归属感，又给人一种游离的体验。正是在这种矛盾交织中，观者得以触及内心情感的丰富层次。艺术家选择用“重游”为展览命名。这一短短两字的动词，在诸多层面上凝练了贯穿这组作品的深层渴望。像近年来许多年轻的中国艺术家一样，闫欣悦选择移居海外来获得新的视角和创作切入点——这往往唯有距离才能赋予。这种距离感，以及随之而来的失落与发现，构成了本次展览的主题。

Yan Xinyue 闫欣悦 | Awaiting 等待 | 2023 | oil on linen 亚麻布面油画 | 120 x 150 cm??????????

这些作品强烈的临场感迫使观众直面其中疏离和怀旧的情绪。《等待》（2023）描绘的繁忙停机坪虽是艺术家虚构，但它却切实地唤起了我们多年来历经的无数次离别场景。作品的焦点是画布右上方炽热的太阳，它将自己光芒所能触达的一切染上深沉的金黄，下方的跑道任它烧得灼热刺目，蒙上一层盛夏黄昏降至时分的荒凉。在此，我们等待的是启程。去往何方这一刻不再重要。画面绚烂的暖色描绘的是远去与距离的冰冷事实。

闫欣悦刻画的一系列风景中的人物，正如作品标题直白所示，深入探究了画中人物与其周围环境的关系，这也是展览中另一个反复出现的主题。《他和他的风景》（2024）将“风景”一词定义得颇为宽泛。我们习惯将“风景”与室外空间联系在一起，尤其在传统的绘画语境中。而在这件作品中我们看到的“风景”是俯视角呈现的室内空间，任何进入过亚洲大型综合商场的人都会对画中交叠的多层扶梯感到熟悉。这里的“他”从远处看仿佛是位寻常路人，却在身后蓝色翅膀的簇拥下显得生动跳脱。他实则是一个行走的广告牌。公司雇佣工人身着带有宣传标语的翅膀装饰做营销活动。我们视线的距离令他显得灵动脱俗，与这座空洞的销金窟格格不入。而正当我们在远处对他的形象心生喜爱时，我们恍然意识到他与周遭环境竟是如此贴合。

与这件作品呼应的《她和她的风景#1》（2024）绘于细长的布面木板上，主宰画面的是被烟花染成紫色的夜空。在这绚烂美景下方，长幅画面的最底部，一位神似艺术家本人的年轻女子舒展地仰面躺在悬崖边。不难发现，艺术家（或者这个代表她的人物）在展出作品中多次出现，仿佛她需要不时让自己悬浮在身体之外，用这种外部视角来观看自己，以此与她身处的新环境达成和解。每天去洛杉矶市中心阳光充足的工作室画画，她体验着陌生环境带来的新鲜和惊喜，同时也尝试发现自己能如何融入，如何自处。历来自画像就是艺术家自我探索和定位的方式之一，无论他们感受到的漂泊是真实的还是源于想象。由此说来，闫欣悦的绘画方法既能唤起深刻的共情，也坚定地植根于艺术史的脉络之中。

闫欣悦在“重游”中呈现的画作探讨了背井离乡带来的隔阂、疏离、渴望的形和意。作品组成的动人挽歌在所有归期未有期的旅人间产生悠远的回响。

文：Travis Jeppesen

Yan Xinyue 闫欣悦 | Self care #1 自爱时光#1 | 2024 | oil on linen 亚麻布面油画 | 80 x 120 cm

Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present “Revisit”, Yan Xinyue’s (b. 1992, China) second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will be on view at Capsule Shanghai from May 25 to August 10, 2024.

The paintings evoke both a sense of rootedness and the experience of exile; and it is in this very contradictoriness that one discovers their wealth of emotion. For the exhibition title, Yan has chosen “Revisit” – a single word, a verb that in many ways encapsulates the underlying desire uniting these works. Like many young Chinese artists in recent years, Yan has chosen to move abroad in order to attain a new perspective, a new angle on her subjects that, very often, only distance can provide. This distancing, and the sense of both loss and discovery that it entails, serves as the theme of the exhibition.

Figures in landscapes – studies, really, of figures and their relationships to their surroundings, as the titles alone make bluntly clear – are another recurring preoccupation of these paintings. Him and His Landscape, 2024, uses the term in a rather loose sense: rather than the view of some exterior scene as we tend to connote “landscape” – particularly in a classical painterly sense – we have an interior shot from above of a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has visited a mega-mall in Asia: that of the express multi-floor escalator. The “him” depicted here appears, from afar, like a banal figure, save for the addition of blue wings surrounding his person. In fact, he is a walking advertisement – workers are paid by firms to wear these wings with commercial messaging printed upon them. From this distance, he appears otherworldly, out of place in this empty palace of consumption; his distant likeness gains our affection when we realize how very deeply he in fact belongs to this environment. 

The obverse of this painting, Her with Her Landscape #1, 2024, painted upon long, thin wooden panels, is a nocturnal sky turned purple by the fireworks illuminating it. Beneath this breathtaking scene, splayed out on a clifftop at the very bottom of the painting, is a young woman who resembles the artist herself. In fact, the artist – or else a figure that is meant to stand in for her – recurs in many of these works. It is as though she needs to temporarily view herself from the outside in order to come to terms with these new locales in which she finds herself situated. Painting each day in her sun-drenched studio in downtown Los Angeles, Yan experiences both the joys and wonder of experiencing a new, foreign environment, while at the same time longing to discover where and how she herself might fit in. Self-portraiture is but one of the ways that artists throughout time have sought to anchor themselves, regardless as to whether their sensation of being adrift is real or wholly imagined; in this, Yan’s painterly approach is both deeply empathic and firmly rooted in an art historical lineage. 

Grappling with the metaphysics of estrangement, alienation, and longing that are well known to all expatriates who, for one reason or another, have elected to leave their homelands behind, Yan Xinyue puts forth a moving elegy in the paintings comprising “Revisit” that will resonate with all who have set forth on journeys wherein a concrete idea of return is far from certain.

关于艺术家 ABOUT THE ARTIST

Hovering 悬停?????

展览现场，悬停，胶囊威尼斯，意大利威尼斯；由Riccardo Banfi拍摄????????????