Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works by Yi Xin TONG, Leo ARNOLD, YU Xiao, and WANG Xiaofu. Titled “Layered Surface”, the exhibition brings together pieces which take the two-dimensional surface as a starting point to explore new alternatives for artistic practices. Beyond the different sociocultural contexts and art trajectories the exhibited artists are in, what coheres their practices is the desire to broaden the conventions with their own approaches and perspectives. The exhibition will be on view at Vanguard Gallery from March 18th through May 14th, 2023.

A flaneur of modern days, Yi Xin TONG collects fragments of daily life and transforms them into poem. The tapestry work on view, “Animalistic Punk – Bones” (2019), is a collage of allegories and ecological studies, in which myriads of human relics, science histories, mythologies, and landscapes construct fictional spaces with a sense of confusion of time coordinates. With its intricate and ornate patterns, this piece of tapestry is conceived as a two-dimensional installation, which embodies the artist’s conceptual experiment on the acquisition, classification, extraction and use of human knowledge.

For Leo ARNOLD, painting is an instrument to reflect on the artist’s own image and his surroundings. During the process of painting, he constantly returns to the same piece of work and deposits moods and emotions that have been accumulated over time. Drawing inspirations from reality, Arnold works in a receptive and open manner, responding to the very nature of painting. His paintings are not premeditated therefore offering the viewer a record of a discovery. In this sense, unforeseen moments, accidents, and mistakes have become essential to his most recent body of work. By revisiting his canvases, Arnold makes alterations and allows spontaneousness in the picture plane, making peace with qualities such as anxiety, regret and uncertainty.

YU Xiao’s practice subverts the idea of seen and unseen in the making of paintings. By center- staging the area of potential vulnerability or nothingness, Yu Xiao aims to elucidate the back or underside of the paintings, the leftover, the frame, or otherwise neglected, and to uncover the underlying structure of painting, divulging the complex materials and techniques applied in her oeuvre whilst highlighting the physical dimension of the painted surface. The works’ appearance merges the hybrid abstraction of gesture and geometrical imagery as well as sculptural exterior. They are the result of painting, printing, physical manipulations. Yu Xiao re-examines aesthetics and deconstruction as methods while aligning with new technologies to offer an alternative route to the tradition of painting.

The painted surfaces created by WANG Xiaofu offer an atmosphere that is on the brink of becoming abstract, where recognizable elements appear as guideposts that draw the viewer into a realm of dreams. One traverses the canvas with a sense of dizziness, oscillating between the actuality of the forms and their illusory nature that toys with perception. The act of painting enables Wang the opportunity to reflect on the intersection between existence and perception, in common with the overlaps, reflections, and opacities that often occur between the two. The foci on “forest” and “theater” have been the kernel of her latest practice, based on which she depicts the distortion of life-forms and environments through the lens of time, blurred and morphed beyond recognition.