Soka Art is pleased to announce the exclusive representation of artist Yan Zhancheng and will hold his solo exhibition Voice Before the Performance. The exhibition will open on July 1, Saturday at 4 pm, Soka Art Beijing, and remain on view until August 5, 2023, with new large-scale works created by the artist in the past year on display.

Entry

Yan Zhancheng was born in Yan'an in 1984. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. The days when roots sprouted in his hometown have put a dry filter on his pictures. The north western land of China stored in the depths of his memory is not narrated in his works directly but revealed inadvertently which forms his distinctive pictorial language. Intuitive colors are as bright as a hat picked up by laborers on the way out the door, while the people who inhabit his images wear thick clothing to add weight to the works. The five large-scale works presented in this exhibition are as vivid as a stage play: viewers will feel seating in the theatre as they look up at the images.

Wait

The gongs and drums sound light; the draping curtain stands steadily like a red wall; one table and two chairs are quietly placed on the stage until the bright singing voice of the young male role breaks the silence of waiting. The actor had not yet taken the stage, but his voice was already singing, which reassured the audience. After the prelude, the actor is about to take the stage.

This way of singing before appearing raises audience's expectations for the performance and makes individual set a stable mood in a calm rhythm. In the same way, when we get close to the pictures, it seems that there is a voice from the inner world of the painting, like a whisper. Yan commissions his artworks to communicate directly with the audience, without any explanatory guide attached. It was too unimaginative to guide the imagination of the audience, and so, instead, he allowed any speculation as to his intentions.The artist behind the paintings is telling some weird but fantastic tales with a hint of pathos, some of which always have an open-ended ending. There is no one on the stage, but the audience can hardly extricate themselves from wanderings.

Appear

Yan is a good secret-keeper who only communicates with people across time and space using brushwork and color without announcing the correct answer. It's like a riddle interaction or a chemical research experiment in a completely new field, where drama and instability abound. Literary classics, plays, poems, and any four-dimensional slices in written form will be absorbed in his creative process. These collected fragments are processed and imaged through the unique type of converter in his mind, and then his inner interpretation is mapped out on the canvas through the filter of his subconscious. Instead of acting directly on the picture, the chemical reaction generated by the text does not directly affect the picture, but pulls him away from the picture, helps him subconsciously move the brush, moves through the media of different dimensions, and allows the impulsive color blocks and lines to intertwine, squeeze and wrestle with each other. His way of performing is to discover with oil-paint. Sometimes he will encounter "strangers" in his own picture, while Yan always chooses to keep them and communicate repeatedly, and then gradually becomes familiar with them. He also does not know what he will encounter in the picture the next minute, and this randomness of creation contains more possibilities for understanding. In a nutshell, the interpretation is left to the viewers.

Begin

Yan expects someone to walk into the paintings and pick up the clues he once dropped unintentionally: perhaps an untouchable verb, a hesitant expression, or an unheeded boot store. Standing in front of the bustling image, some might see it as a showcase of why a small-town bakery is so thriving. The bakery cooks take advantage of the giant's sound sleep and ride the waves to the dream market to buy magical ingredients. Before dawn, they sprinkle the magic cinnamon powder on the road leading to the bakery in front of each door. The aroma emanating from the cinnamon powder leads the early-morning matrons, who have woken up to clean the yard to the bakery unaware and let them bring back the family's staple food for the day.

Play

The boxer loses another fight, and on the last day of his fighting career, he tells his wife, who is preparing dinner, that he wants to become a stand-up comedian and break his opponent in a more painful way. The wife couldn't remember how many career changes it was and what else was in the fridge.