YUAN YUAN

Born in 1973 in Zhejiang, China
Lives and works in Hangzhou, China

After graduating from the painting department at the renowned Art Academy of Hangzhou in 2008, Yuan Yuan is emerging on the international art scene, with a new generation of Chinese artists such as MadeIn. His singularity resides in the topics of his paintings and in the way he treats their surface with dense and multi-layered brushstrokes, flattened into a plane and vibrant surface. Whether they depict landscapes or interiors, usually devoid of any presence, these scenes are somehow immersed in an atmosphere of fantasy, using cold tones, and lying between reality and illusion, attraction and repulsion. The topics are always inspired by the artist’s own experiences, although he often uses ready-made images as a starting point for the construction of his paintings, which hint at collective memory. Above all, his paintings bear witness to the rapid economic and social transition in China, by picturing different social classes, especially the kitsch and grandiloquent interiors of the new rich class, emptied of their owners. Meteoric Water is part of a series of places related to water and leisure - swimming pools, steam rooms or fountains -, filled yet again with a sense of melancholy, and in which the reminiscent pattern of the ceramic tiles abstracts the images and implements a strong visual effect.