HOW Art Museum is pleased to announce that the solo exhibition: Spice, Lu Ban& Babylon of artist Yan Heng, will be on view from March 1, 2025. The exhibition will present paintings and new installation works by artist Yan Heng, showing the audience the duality of civilization, technology and art through symbolic elements and creations with strong metaphors, and exploring the three major themes of life, desire and death. The exhibition will be on display until May 11, 2025.
"The world’s my oyster. Which I with sword will open."
— William Shakespeare
The course of human civilization has always been an alchemy of paradoxes. When the sailing ships from the Age of Exploration loaded with precious spices piercing through the silence of the sea; when the wooden bird made by master carpenter Lu Ban flying high in the sky but never returned; and when the Tower of Babel crumbled into ruins… such historical incidents have always been the eternal wrestlings of the contradicted forces reflected in history’s double-faced mirror: between creation and destruction, between order and chaos and between the sublime and the depraved. This exhibition‘Spice, Lu Ban& Babylon’ by artist Yan Heng acts like a dagger casting towards this mirror where the fragmented historical metaphors and the contemporary problems solemnly and poetically melt together.
Yan Heng's works revolve around three primal subjects: life, desire and death, an heritage of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Yan’s works are filled with double-edged metaphors aiming to build up a world image underpinned with hallucinatory realism. For example, the gilded empty oyster shells, the symbol of luxury; hidden within a medical scanner and under the radar is a Buddha Flesh sculpture; inside a gallery hanging with Picasso paintings, we encounter with the cheerful Snow White’s 7 dwarves which now turn into cold-hearted security checkers. Like some cinematic montages merging with AGI, these works draw together everything from medical to scientific, questioning the existing capital-driven art production: when art becomes a merchandise on an assembly-line, can it still convey the profound meaning on life and death? Or it has been transformed into painkillers with pretty package? In this exhibition, Yan continues with his signature style of blending and mixing paintings with ready-mades, through collecting, sorting and reassembling fragments of information and symbols, his images are filled with experimental visual paradoxes.
The exhibition tackles a wide range of topics, from social upheaval to commercialization of art, from technological expansion to space exploration. InSpice,a humble pepper shaker intertextualizes the image of a smashed Rolls-Royce, reminding how spices fueled both cultural exchange and colonial plunder history. Echo takes a darker turn — a metallic chamber stuffed with skulls, books, and a washing machine, overlaid with computer motherboards and code. Is this our answer to the lost volume of masterLu Ban's Book? As we rely on technology to map the boundary between reality and illusion, are we accidentally cracking open the Pandora's box perhaps? Yan's works intentionally carry flaws — damaged beauty, deformed body. Much related to his personal experiences as a child, he strives to establish beauty in the essence of tragedy. If the body is seen as an object, an intense, imperfect and diversified body may as well be the last rebel against the technical aggression of our times.
Yan Heng's creations have always maintained Dylan Thomas’s style of ‘savage growth’. He refuses to be catalogued into any school or style. His paradoxical images ultimately point to the eternal notion of creation, annihilation and rebuilding. If we humans continue to be the slaves of our desires, are we going to be devoured by our own reflections? The exhibition does not give a specific answer, but rather some reflections through the prism of the broken mirror.
written by Curator Zheng Guo
