Yan Zhancheng ­— One, Two, Three

Text / Sun Dongdong

In my backyard, you can see two trees outside the wall.

One is a date tree, and the other is also a date tree.

 — Luxun, Autumn Night

But today I think: this stone is a stone,

it is also animal, it is also god, it is also Buddha,

I do not venerate and love it because it could turn into this or that,

but rather because it is already and always everything—

and it is this very fact, that it is a stone,

that it appears to me now and today as a stone.

— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

I

A question arises when looking at Yan Zhancheng’s recent paintings: why has the background—the visual “substrate” of his images—become increasingly purified, approaching a kind of neutral space? For viewers primarily seeking visual recognition, this is hardly a concern. After all, painting has long been a technique of image-making, and a recognizable form often suffices. However, if a contemporary artist still adheres to this logic, it simply reveals a lack of engagement with “modern” reflection. In such a mindset, the blank canvas remains a mere window to the external world, and the artist’s task is merely to depict what is seen. Interestingly, since graduating from the academy, Yan Zhancheng has been actively attempting to escape this external control and domination over his practice.

In the beginning, for Yan, the so-called “external world” referred primarily to the academic system’s linguistic model for organizing and representing the world. His strategy was to revise that representational model. In his early career, around 2014–2015, his works were no longer concerned with representational fidelity but instead played with texture. Through the unfolding of landscapes, the spatial relationship between figure and ground became obscured by mottled colors and rich surface textures, rendering the image ambiguous, reduced to a series of sensory details. Though this was simply a shift in representational language, the material cues from the external world remained. These served as Yan’s entry point into a new understanding of the painting’s flatness—an effort to detach from academic influence.

What followed was a heightened demand for spatial order. As the image gradually emerged from the background, Yan’s compositions began to manifest a distinct figure-ground relationship. Line-based contours, paired with external shapes, were orchestrated through color and brushwork to reinforce the painting’s internal structure. Moving from texture to form, Yan has persistently reduced the external world to enhance the reality conveyed through his paintings. Correspondingly, his figures have come to occupy more central roles on the canvas. This progression evokes the shifting frames of cinematic perspective—from long shot to medium shot to close-up. The background supporting these figures has grown increasingly silent, until in his most recent works, it becomes completely still.

“Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Yan’s approach to painting backgrounds recalls the principle proposed by 14th-century English logician William of Ockham, later named “Ockham’s Razor.” The principle is often stated as follows: when multiple explanations are available for an observed phenomenon, one should adopt the simplest or most falsifiable, at least until further evidence arises. Those familiar with the history of philosophy will recognize an “Empiricism” in this axiom—hence its widespread application in science. Yet in a different context, say social life, what exactly is being removed by the razor? Who or what decides what should remain or be discarded?

When this question is posed to Yan Zhancheng, his response is found not in language but in action—echoing Wittgenstein’s dictum: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” For Yan, this silence reflects a post-pandemic existential sensibility. The uncertainty of the external world has led the background to revert to a primal, gestational state. One might interpret this as an ontological void—a return to the origin of life. Yet in terms of language, it becomes a rhetorical transformation: an art of silent expression. “Silence is better than speech” follows the earlier line “unspoken grief breeds deeper sorrow.” Rather than speak, it is often the well-timed silence that proves most truthful.

II

In Yan Zhancheng’s recent paintings, the figures almost invariably wear hats. A hat is a garment designed to cover the head—sometimes for shade, rain, or protection, sometimes as a marker of social status or ceremonial identity, though today it more often serves as a fashion accessory. Strictly speaking, however, a hat is not a daily necessity like clothing; it is more of an extension of clothing. Precisely because of this, when the hat becomes a recurring and essential element in Yan’s paintings, it prompts us to examine the costumes worn by his figures. What we find is that, compared to garments that cling to the body, the geometric form of the hat serves as a formal device for regulating the figures’ shapes.

This is both a method and a painterly insight. Or perhaps, a kind of foreshadowing—one that traces back to Yan’s “contour line” period, when he was resisting the dictates of realism while probing the autonomy of form. Hats began appearing in his works around 2018, during this very phase. He drew on his draftsmanship to manipulate existing art-historical image structures through distorted figures, creating formal intrigue. The hats themselves may have been inspired by Hieronymus Bosch: strange, exaggerated, and seemingly detached from narrative impulse. For Yan, they offered a means of distancing his work from present-day reality.

As noted before, Yan’s practice is a gradual process of negating the external world. Yet as the image presses closer to the viewer, the painting’s rectangular frame becomes increasingly conspicuous. The rectangle signals a kind of visual reality, despite being an abstract geometric shape that never occurs naturally. In art history, the frame has always appeared as a paradox—an artificial boundary within a constructed world. If form is autonomous, then the edge implied by the frame becomes a philosophical boundary between inside and outside. Whether through the dissolution of perspective or the constraints of modernist formalism, artists across time have devised various strategies to address the burden of the frame.

For Yan, too, the substrate eliminates external interference and points to an interiorized visual consciousness. Before the image materializes, the blank ground is indistinguishable from nothingness. But once figuration begins, the frame takes on real presence. For the artist, the frame is not just an external boundary—it transforms into a compositional space or shape within the painting itself. Especially for an artist like Yan, who seeks to establish his own formal logic within the legacy of modernism, this internalized frame becomes a historical problem he must confront. Thus, the “hat” in his work carries dual significance: when affixed to a figure, it becomes a cultural symbol that evokes the viewer’s own experiences and triggers curiosity about the figure’s identity. As a formal shape, it grants Yan greater flexibility in his construction of form.

To clarify this relationship, take for example his 2024 painting The Sage in the Blue Hat. In this work, Yan depicts two individuals wearing blue hats. Blue, in color psychology, often represents control and direction. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats associates the blue hat with leadership and organization. The hat’s shape is reminiscent of a Catholic bishop’s mitre, evoking memories of Western portraiture. Though titled “sage,” the figures are not individualized. Starting with shape, Yan divides the composition into two masses slanting downward to the right. The upper blue region forms a stable upward-reaching triangle. The profile on the right naturally draws the viewer’s gaze, which then follows the figure’s torso upward to the hat’s pointed tip, ultimately piercing the frame’s top edge. In this sense, the sages transcend their bounds—those bounds being the artist’s own bodily frame. Each hat, then, becomes not merely a costume but a metaphor for the head as the seat of insight.

III

“One, Two, Three”—the title of Yan Zhancheng’s solo exhibition—originates from the artist’s own enumerative logic in naming his figures. Counting, as a rhetorical act, reflects his method of classifying the images in his work. To Yan, each painting is a collection, and the exhibition as a whole becomes a kind of visual inventory—a catalogue of his works from 2024 to 2025. Viewers, especially those attuned to systematic logic, may feel puzzled: works from the same year often appear radically different, while pieces from different periods may show striking affinities. Perhaps, like Borges’ fictitious encyclopedia compiled by a Chinese emperor, Yan is building a world of his own categories.

Still, while every painting depicts a human figure, the exhibition title conspicuously omits a subject. “One, Two, Three”—this incremental listing—what is it truly pointing toward? Drawing on the insight of Italian semiotician Umberto Eco: “Though each idea belongs to the same conceptual field, each new iteration adds a layer of meaning, or expresses the same concept with heightened intensity.” What, then, is the conceptual field of Yan Zhancheng’s work? What remains constant across his variations? In a certain kind of riddle, the answer lies within the question—the missing subject “human” might just be the key to decoding the enumeration.

We should first recognize that the human image predates its representation. A person simply is before being depicted. Thus, it is unsurprising that Yan often finds inspiration in audiobooks—sometimes a phrase or word sparks an image. The newly imagined figure is already latent within the artist’s body. His task is to extract it. From this perspective, his 2024 painting The Ham Actors is particularly telling: two figures are enclosed within a large shape, as though conjured from the background’s depths—a spectral emergence.

Yet in his other works from the same year, we notice a tonal shift. For instance, in The Sage in the Blue Hat, the shapes remain, but the smooth line contours give way to expressive brushwork layered with texture. The earlier emphasis on positive and negative space is gradually replaced by a concern for volume. Similarly, in many 2025 works, Yan deliberately crops the figures’ legs at the bottom of the frame, transforming them into pedestal-like bases. This sculptural quality is reinforced by strong diagonal strokes that accentuate surface mass.

Curiously, as we follow the form upward, we encounter facial expressions and gestures that often feel startlingly mundane—imbued with an earthy, even rustic, quality. This tension between elevated form and grounded expression may hint at the deeper implications of Yan’s enumeration. As phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “There is a kinship between the being of the earth and that of my body…. This kinship extends to others, who appear to me as other bodies, to animals whom I understand as variants of my embodiment, and finally even to terrestrial bodies since I introduce them into the society of living bodies.” Returning to Yan’s work, if the human figure now reclaims a kind of universality, then embedded within it must also be a reversal between the elevated and the grounded.