Yuan Fang: Dangerous Waters

Skarstedt is delighted to announce Dangerous Waters, Yuan Fang’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s debut in London. The exhibition showcases twelve new paintings marked by their monumental scale, cascading cyclical forms and deep, redolent colour palette. The paintings on display illustrate Fang’s cerebral exploration of water as both a spatial barrier and a representation of women, providing an intimate insight into the artist’s world. Choosing the exhibition title for its personal resonance, Fang explains that it is about both the ‘external and internal’, alluding to the danger presented to us and that we present to society....

The paintings on display illustrate Fang’s cerebral exploration of water as both a spatial barrier and a representation of women, providing an intimate insight into the artist’s world. Choosing the exhibition title for its personal resonance, Fang explains that it is about both the ‘external and internal’, alluding to the danger presented to us and that we present to society.

After moving to New York City at the age of eighteen, Fang was exposed to the gestural and expressive abstractions of Willem de Kooning, Cecily Brown and Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings in particular opened her eyes to the possibilities of painting. Understanding it to be a bodily experience, Fang loses herself in the rhythmic flowing forms which are unpredictable yet beautifully harmonious, describing the entire process as akin to running a marathon. In this way, the cathartic act of painting facilitates the release of unrestrained emotions through the physicality of the medium. Not only do her prodigious paintings reflect the anxieties inherent to New York, but they are also an outlet for the artist’s residual childhood frustrations of feeling at odds with the strict rules in place within Asian culture.

The exhibition centres on both the literal and metaphorical associations of water. The title, Dangerous Waters, refers to the tumultuous and uncertain world we live in. Yet, on another level, it highlights water as a spatially divisive body, separating continents with vast oceans, which paintings like Sea Storm or Frozen Waves 02 evoke. Drawn to repetitive organic formations, Fang’s oeuvre conjures strong oceanic associations, cautioning the viewer with undertones of danger as hinted in the painting’s titles, such as Dark Clouds 02 or Dark Forest Strolling. From the artist’s birthplace in coastal Shenzhen to the East River in New York, water holds a particular significance to the artist, a familiarity that shines through in the energy and fluidity of her paintings.

Interlaced with feminity, Dangerous Waters explores traditional Chinese associations between women and water. The character Jia Baoyu in Dream of the Red Chamber (1791) said, ‘Women are like water, possessing spirituality like water, goodness like water, resilience like water, and tenderness like water.’ These feminine associations carry through into Fang’s paintings as she explores the symbolism between the two. On the one hand, women are associated with the life-giving properties of water, yet Fang also understands ‘dangerous waters’ to be an allegory for the volatility of feminine desire, both in strength and devastation. Accented with dusty pink hues, Lady’s Eardrops masterfully reflects the female experience, using shades of pinks, peaches and reds to celebrate the power of women. Indeed, the colour palette across the series carries meaningful connotations; where pink refers to female desire, blue signifies water.

Characterised by lyrical and bodily swirls, Yuan Fang’s paintings simultaneously envelop the viewer into an unruly web and elicit soulful contemplations on our civilisation, be that the uncertainty pervasive in today’s geopolitical climate or the broader associations surrounding water as a symbolic entity. Expanding on the multi-layered complexities of her painting, Fang explains that ‘I always wanted to depict a sense of turbulence or chaos which mimics the living condition of human beings.’

©Yuan Fang. Courtesy the artist and Skarstedt, New York. Photo: Frenel Morris

Yuan Fang was born in Shenzhen, China, in 1996. Growing up in a large, metropolitan city encouraged her to embrace a global and eclectic view of the world, an outlook furthered by her first visit to the United States as a young girl and subsequent relocation to the country. Fang attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she received the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding ...

Yuan Fang was born in Shenzhen, China, in 1996. Growing up in a large, metropolitan city encouraged her to embrace a global and eclectic view of the world, an outlook furthered by her first visit to the United States as a young girl and subsequent relocation to the country. Fang attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she received the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement. She then continued at SVA, receiving her MFA from the institution in 2022 under the tutelage of artists such as James Siena and Marilyn Minter. It was through this experience that she was able to come into close contact with artists from The New York School as well as Francis Bacon—all of whom have left their mark on her practice. Living in another country has both expanded her understanding of our global contemporary environment and brought her closer to her cultural roots and ideological foundations. Perceiving herself as a site of intertwining cultural experiences and awareness, she explores the dichotomy of global connection and diasporic living in her work.

Fang’s work is often large in scale and entirely abstract, characterised by lyrical and massive swirls of paint. These energetic marks are geological in their feel, tied to notions of the body, landscape, space, and time. Fang describes these amorphous forms as distorted human bodies, and she builds them up on her canvas improvisationally, without using preparatory sketches or studies. This fluid yet intense way of working allows for unexpected discoveries and risk-taking that is important to Fang’s process.

Fang has already received numerous accolades and has participated in multiple solo and group shows around the world. In 2024, she was chosen for the 30 under 30 list by Forbes Asia and became the youngest artist to ever receive a solo exhibition at the Long Museum with her show, Flux. Other recent gallery exhibitions include Skarstedt, London (2024); Half Gallery, New York (2023); Prince & Wooster, New York (2022) and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2021). Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; the FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Inima de Paula Museum, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and the Long Museum, Shanghai, China, among others.