STARLIGHT PROJECT: TWO DOTS
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Yet, even the shortest line can encompass countless points. Moreover, there are myriad paths from one point to another. Recently, after attending the spring auction in Beijing and visiting the graduation exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, I found myself profoundly moved. Whether they are the revered masters of the past, the current luminaries of the market, or the newly graduated artists embarking on their journeys, they all contribute to the vast and intricate tapestry of the art world. Here, each one occupies a unique space, constantly floating and shifting.
IM Gallery's "Starlight Project," in collaboration with several emerging galleries from the Fujian and Guangdong regions, has meticulously selected the artists for this exhibition from a diverse pool of young talent after extensive observation and study. These artists, despite their varied styles, are all regarded with great anticipation. Their backgrounds, education, and life experiences are distinct and varied, but between two points, each has found a temporary yet significant place. Let us eagerly anticipate the inaugural edition of the Starlight Project.
LinKaixuan
Rhythm of the Heart 2, 2023
oil on canvas
200 x 150 cm
Tan Dejie
Tan Dejie (b. 1999) graduated from the Oil Painting School of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Guangzhou. His work focuses on exploring unusual emotions within scenes and spaces. Using painting and video as mediums, he guides the audience into emotional landscapes, exploring how emotions are expressed and intertwined in different environments.
"Threshold spaces" are transitional parts of scenes that we often pass through quickly rather than making them the focus of our journey. The lack of memory details intensifies the unusual feelings we experience in these spaces. Standing in front of his works, one feels a deep calm and introspective depth, with only the flavor of ghosts and solitary monologues filling the space. These overlooked scenes seem to exist in a dreamlike déjà vu.
TanDejie
Transfer Station 1, 2022
oil on canvas
90 x 155 cm
TanDejie
Transfer Station 2, 2022
oil on canvas
90 x 155 cm
Wang Jundi
Wang Jundi (b. 1993) is currently studying at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and lives and works in Milan, Italy.
"For me, painting or art is an unrestricted way of expression and questioning. It allows me to confront real life, especially overcoming the limitations of language and the constraints of various rules in real life: it does not provide a single, definite answer. That is its charm.
The way I pose 'questions' lies between reality and imagination. Real elements bring the viewer closer to the work, while fantasy elements provide more possibilities. In this way, I hope my works can transcend boundaries and remain open. Viewers can give different answers based on their experiences and feelings, and each answer will be correct. It allows me to immerse myself in my world, observe and reflect on the things around me, and shape and re-present them in a way that condenses my true feelings. My paintings are composed of gestures and symbols, like a diary recording the stories of my life. Life is made up of personal experiences, and I use these experiences."
WangJundi
Please look with your eyes, 2023
oil on canvas
17 x 25 cm
WangJundi
Roulette, 2023
oil on canvas
25 x 17 cm
Wang Yihan
Wang Yihan (b. 1998) graduated from the Printmaking school of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and is currently pursuing her master's degree. She likes to express vitality, fascinated by the energy that plants or animals burst forth when they are dying or in danger, and the instinctual life force people display at moments of decisive choices in desperate situations.
During her studies, Wang Yihan has won several awards. She participated in exhibitions including the "Shijiazhuang Youth Art Biennale", Shijiazhuang Art Museum, China (2023); "3.27%", Special Art Space, Chengdu, China (2022); "First Encounter, Farewell", Yue Art Museum, Beijing, China (2022); "Intervention", Kou Wen Art, Shanghai, China (2022); "Approaching Tradition, Moving Away from Experimentation", Gulangyu Contemporary Art Center, Xiamen, China (2021); the "Central Academy of Fine Arts Printmaking Department Teaching Research Exhibition", Taoxichuan Art Museum, Jingdezhen, China (2021).
Liang Licong
Liang Licong (b. 1999) graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Guangzhou. Her creations typically depict scenes, landscapes, objects, and animals.
"For me, the joy of painting lies in the subject's involvement in this process, giving me a very real and satisfying sense of existence. In my creations, I attempt to use subjective emotional expressions to make different individuals become a new whole through intersecting and entangling, thereby gaining an illogical sense of mystery. This illogicality keeps me alert. I like to retain many traces of glazing, erasure, destruction, and washing in the painting, not pursuing neatness and accuracy, but rather letting the brush strokes fall naturally. The work itself presents something you have seen before, hoping that this illogical sense of mystery can provide a new way of thinking and a new impulse."
PanWenjie
Swivel Chair Night, 2023
oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm
Yu Wenjie
Yu Wenjie (b. 1997) graduated from the Department of Experimental Art at the China Academy of Art and later obtained a master's degree from the Royal College of Art. He currently lives and works in London and Shanghai.
He is an artist who plays the world with a sense of insecurity. His works focus on expressing the inner experiences generated during the exploration of the world by the body and mind. These inner experiences give rise to illusions, memories, associations, fantasies, and feelings, constantly breaking and reorganizing into visual fragments. These fragments lose the constraints of time and space but maintain a similar temporal and spatial distance from his current experiences. The natural gaps between these visual fragments are either emphasized directly in his works or subtly transitioned. Thus, grand and small narratives always coexist in his works, manifesting delicately and sensitively in the process of material destruction and reshaping, showing a "fragile but firm" innocence and romance.
Painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and sound are his usual mediums. He combines history and future in a jumpy manner, showing in his works that "the present is both the past and the future." His inspiration system is vast and complex, making it difficult to find specific inspirational clues in his works. He is a mixed and diverse artist, skilled at directly translating his spiritual world into the colors and images of the real world through his works. He maintains principles while constantly changing rapidly, believing that "not being changed by the world is actually changing the world."
Chen Yiming
Chen Yiming (b. 1993) graduated from the Department of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and currently lives and works in Yanjiao, China. Unlike grandiose themes, Chen Yiming tends to focus on the fragments of everyday life. In his creative process, he often digs up images from memory and reassembles them illogically according to his intuition.
Thus, his works often carry an unconventional sense of humor.A distinctive feature of Chen Yiming's work is its "nonsensical" humor, but behind it, there is always a subtle unease. This unease, like a needle, is small and sharp, making one feel a slight sting and discomfort, yet it is thought-provoking, capable of resonating with and making viewers reflect unconsciously. Visually, his works often appear calm and restrained, without superfluous embellishments. The dark humor in these seemingly "ordinary" life scenes seems infinitely close to us, always around, every day.
ChenYiming
Untitled, 2024
oil on canvas
80 x 100 cm
Lin Kaixuan
Lin Kaixuan (b. 2001) graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and is currently studying and living in London, attending the University of the Arts London. Her works focus on the relationship between painting and bodily movement, abstracting the real world. She typically uses mixed painting media including acrylic, watercolor, oil, gouache, and ink, and experiments with different sculptural forms to present new ideas and expand her creative practice. Her works often revolve around her own experiences, such as female identity, bodily liberation, spiritual freedom, and emotional expression.
"In my paintings, I incorporate the stories I encounter, preserving them like leaves in my perception. Conceptual ideas and innate intuition drive my creation. Lines, with their dancing rhythm, continue my thought processes, mixing with orderly, stratified, controlled geometric shapes, growing, flowing, changing, and extending in the picture like tubers. Lines have become a way of self-interpretation and self-writing for me, with the tangled, chaotic lines in my work tracing the trajectory of my self-awareness."
Lin Kaixuan's works have won multiple awards during her studies and have been continuously exhibited both inside and outside the school. This year, she participated in group exhibitions including "Impromptu," Espacio Gallery, London, UK (2024); "Process," Milbank Tower, London, UK (2024); "Art Phoenix - 2024 National Young Artists Oil Painting Exhibition," Phoenix Art Museum, Jiangsu, China.
Photo: Exhibition site
Ye Ziyan
Ye Ziyan (b. 1998) studied at Guangxi Arts University and Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She currently lives and works in Guangzhou and London. Her art usually combines sculpture with diverse materials, incorporating audio elements. She is adept at reimagining ready-made objects, cleverly integrating them into installations and interacting with the audience. Her themes include post-humanism, technology, interpersonal relationships, communication, family, women's rights, and ecological environmental protection.
Her recent "Communication 1.0 - 3.0" series explores the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and communication in different contexts through a symbolic approach that integrates various media. Her works have been exhibited at West Bund Museum, Shanghai; Times Art Museum, Chengdu; Cookhouse Gallery, London; B.T Betsford Gallery, London; and Millbank Tower, London.The piece "Communication 1.0," exhibited this time, is the first work in the family communication series. It aims to examine identity recognition, the transfer of power relationships, and issues arising from the generational gap and communication conflicts between parents and children. By comprehensively examining these factors, the work seeks to reveal how artistic creation can present identity recognition, power structures, and interpersonal communication dynamics in a patriarchal family background in a symbolic and materialized way.
YeZiyan
Communication 1.0, 2023
Composite Material Device
Zhu Lin
Zhu Lin (b. 1996) graduated with a Master's degree in Art from the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University in 2021, and is currently a Ph.D. student at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, specializing in modern and contemporary art and aesthetics research.
Her works present an interplay between inner sensitivity and the rational world. She actively explores the abstract visual translation of individual perception, weaving memories and landscapes through shapes, and reorganizing flowers, soil, halos, and ruins to express the struggle to break free from rational constraints. She believes the universe is originally grand and mysterious, with all life cyclical. Human imagination and thoughts can take us far, but a disenchanted world resembles a giant machine where life's labor becomes uniform and humanity gradually loses meaning. She hopes to preserve human loneliness and poetry through her paintings.
ZhuLin
Blossom, 2024
acrylic on canvas
50 x 100 cm
Liang Yuhan
Liang Yuhan graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Mural Department of the China Academy of Art and is currently a graduate student in the Watercolor Department at the Yunnan Arts University.
Nature is her solace and utopia, holding special value and meaning in her daily life. She does not wish to praise nature merely with realistic strokes but wants her own feelings and understandings to be involved. Compared to the sense of reality in three-dimensional space, she emphasizes the two-dimensional nature and composition of the picture in her creations, focusing on the expression and composition of the picture itself, and expresses her understanding through simplification and abstraction.
LiangYuhan
Heading into the Distance, 2023
watercolor on paper
50 x 50 cm
WangYihan
Moth Through the Willows, 2023
mixed media on paper
20 x 30 cm
Photoelectric, 2023
mixed media on paper
14 x 18 cm
Willows, 2023
mixed media on paper
30 x 30 cm
Liang Licong
Sweet Home, 2022
oil on canvas
120 x 160 cm
Pan Wenjie
Pan Wenjie (b.1997) graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the Guangxi Arts University Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and earned a Master's degree in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She currently lives and works in London and Suzhou.
"My recent works attempt to avoid specific content and themes, mostly concerning my thoughts on the essence of painting and the fragmented experience brought by real and internet life. During my two years in London, as an outsider, I collided and misinterpreted a new cultural system, trying to transform life encounters and visual perceptions into different painting forms. Accompanied by changing studio environments, identity switching, and text cognition, my painting concepts also changed. This unstable, dynamic creative experience continues to drive me to work on canvas. Over time, the accumulation of layers and repeated 'attacks' of paint on the canvas clarify, blur, or change the purpose of the work."
Pan Wenjie has participated in exhibitions including "Pursuit" (dual exhibition), 2250 Art Space, Jiangsu, China (2021); "Church/Factory," Copeland Gallery, London, UK (2022); "Brick Walls + Glass Ceilings," Wilson Road, London, UK (2022); "It Is All Fun Until...," Safe House Space, London, UK (2022); "2020 Graduation Selection," Space Box, Shenzhen, China (2020); "Guangxi Young Emerging Artists Group Exhibition," Leave Blank Art Museum, Nanning, China (2020).
Photo: Exhibition site
Tu Jingkang
Tu Jingkang graduated from the University of the Arts London with a master's degree in Fine Arts and currently lives and works in London. From the intimate spaces of daily life to the dramatic public stage, his works unfold a narrative expression based on the understanding of Western light and Eastern qi (vital energy). Creation is a necessary path for him to assert his survival instinct, dissecting the subject to detach from past existence experiences and the emotions of the creative moment, explosively recording the intense life movement process. He explores the distance between light and qi through mixed media painting, performance, video, and writing, investigating the internal connection between heaven, earth, and humans.
"Each of my works is an unfinished life, seeking its true state between destruction and preservation as time and space shift. I follow my intuition to rehearse different distances between myself and myself. The exploration and analysis of multiple personalities are at the core of my artistic practice. Form is an independent box, summarizing sensory experiences and integrating them into contemporary contexts through painting, sculpture, performance, video, and writing. I create a unity that transcends self and reality, achieving the fusion of object and self. "
The artist has held solo exhibitions "Ridiculous 21 Years" at Xixian Gallery in 2021 and "Infinite Dimensional Thoughts" at XLYMOMA in 2020 in Chengdu, China. He has also participated in group exhibitions include Moordn Contemporary Art Fair, Guangzhou, China(2023); "Refracted Dream Core," UNIX Studio, Chengdu, China(2023); "The Fading Spaciousness", Bargehouse Gallery, UK(2023); "Bian Feng Bian Ya", HAKUCHI, Chengdu, China (2023); "Little Show", Cookhouse Gallery, UK(2023); "Spectrum, "Bargehouse Gallery, UK(2023); "Tides", Piccadilly Circus, UK(2023); "Forces of the Small", Filet Gallery, London, UK(2023); "IDEA!", XLYMOMA, Chengdu (2021, 2022, 2023); "Transform Our Learning", Shelter Gallery, Chengdu, China(2021).
TuJingkang
JINGGA, 2023
oil on canvas
100 x 80 cm
YuWenjie
Spilt Fantasy into the Deepest Dream 6, 2022
mixed media
80 x 80 cm
