Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present “A Glance” by Jin Haofan, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. A new series of paintings, which furthers Jin’s long-term exploration on private memories and personal perceptions, will be on view at Vanguard Gallery from September 9 through October 22, 2022. In this series, images, sounds, and texts encountered in the artist’s daily life are simmered with his personal memories and sentiments, and reconfigured and coordinated on canvas.

The artist’s iconic depiction of still life, human figures, and abstract graphics remains dominant in this series. In this exhibition, the works are presented as a series of polyptychs with each canvas depicting a subtle variation of the motif. The reoccurring subjects of the multi-panel works include still lifes such as vessels, curtains, and fruits, anonymous figures, and punctuation marks, weaving together a distinct iconography. Rendered in saturated colours and surrealistic light, the paintings situate themselves in the undefined realm between the reality and the dreamland.

Arranged in an order that resembles consecutive frames of film, each polyptych suggests an ambiguous and mythical narrative. This stream of montage demonstrates Jin’s exploration of the uniformity and polymorphic nature of the subject, questioning our fluid perception of the reality.

“A Glance” indicates the moment when the physical reality is captured by the senses, and when the subconscious mind decodes the specific scene into a series of abstract graphics. “My practice is based on a mechanism that understands the conflicts and frictions in life, and all their fragments, through the lens of memory,” Jin remarks. Through painting, the artist establishes the self as a set of coordinates and sails across the vortex of eternal and scattered details of reality rushing from any direction of time.