DSL Collection

??These works are about two things: some are about light, some are about political economy.?? That deceptively simple sentence is how Ye Nan described this grouping of prints and installations to a visitor one winter afternoon as he was in the midst of making them. Ye Nan grew up an avid reader of China??s early popular science compendium One Hundred Thousand Why??s and evolved
into a reader of science fiction. Perhaps it is fitting that this, one of his first full bodies of mature works, departs from these early childhood preoccupations.
Light and political economy are condensed here into two key symbols. The first is match-head red, a maroon substance that can turn at any moment into the glow of flame. This shade, and this material, occur repeatedly throughout these prints. Symbolically, the choice of this red is interesting in its departure from the hue by which the past sixty years of Chinese history have been known. The ambiguity of this reference differentiates Ye Nan from the legions of red-mongering contemporary Chinese artists who have gone before him. His maroon is red inflected with black, and thus removed from the register of political signification. The substance it forms is one of low-budget productivity and constant danger, implicitly evoking the conditions in which he has come of age. One installation proposal, too dangerous to be realized, involved coating an entire side room of the gallery in this phosphate substance and inviting viewers to draw upon it with rough sandpaper, standing against a constant threat of annihilation.
The second motif, standing in for political economy, is the flagpole. The artist Gu Dexin noted in a recent interview that ??the flagpole is a collective phallus.?? Ye Nan seems to articulate a reading slightly more complex than this vivid Freudianism. He is instead curious about unrealized possibilities: the Sixth International, virus-bearing mosquitoes, outdated scientific instruments.
The flagpole occurs again and again, in one composition flagpoles swarm to overtake a single, seemingly helpless planet, evoking an urge to political domination that has little basis in natural reality. Ye Nan has the mind of a scientist, not a moralist, and is more interested in conjectures than declarations, more drawn to testing ideas through images than to representing ideologies through symbols.
That said, he has developed an exceedingly complex visual language, one which draws on copied text from pop-cultural sources, geometrical configurations, iconography, abstraction, and scientific drawing. These diverse styles are bound together through an unrelenting austerity in terms of color and scale, the darkened red offering a strand by which these seemingly incoherent visions
The One Hundred Thousand Whys ?C Ye Nan??s Own Private Realm of Investigation can be visually laced into a single, multifaceted fantasy. This ambition??to give voice to an expansive set of ideas using the full range of techniques available to the artist??is impressive in someone so recently graduated from art school.
The student-teacher connection to Qiu Zhijie is key. The day I visited Ye Nan??s studio, Qiu Zhijie accompanied. The first thing he did upon entering was bend down on one knee beside a recently completed print and strike a match across its rough surface, leaving a mark that might as well have been his own signature. In the mid-2000s, Qiu turned the energy he had once devoted to curatorship toward pedagogy, creating in a few short years an entire curriculum for his alma mater, the China Academy of Art, by which to transmit what he dubbed ??art in general,?? a sprawling practice rooted as much in social investigation and archival research as in three-dimensional and moving-image forms for which he himself had become known. Students in this studio??unorthodox by global, and certainly Chinese, standards??are assigned tasks like inventing a mythology for some ordinary site along Hangzhou??s West Lake, and then posing as a guide to impart this constructed history to unknowing tourists. Ye Nan is among the first beneficiaries of this educational reform, and his versatility and ambition hint at the long-term viability of such an approach.
But beyond this pedagogical link, one can see other echoes of the young Qiu in his quickly maturing pupil. This cycle of prints, for example, evokes nothing in recent memory so much as the extended series of ink paintings Qiu realized for his solo show Breaking the Ice at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art last year. (Those paintings, in turn, evoke a whole register of artists domestic and foreign, chief among them Marcel Duchamp, whose ideas about conceptually grounded two-dimensional composition as evidenced in works like the Large Glass seemed to drip from each of the sheets; Ye Nan??s compositional logic seems to channel one master through the other.)
Today he lives in a barely heated room above his studio within earshot of the passing trains from the circular test line huantie that has become metonymy for Beijing??s young art scene. But the words ??young artist?? don??t really capture the practiced sensibility at play here. His is one on a row of abandoned studios and folded spaces, inhabited quickly in the art frenzy of 2006 and 2007, then
quickly shuttered as times turned tough a year later. Barren and desolate, it??s a landscape not unlike one we might imagine being staked out with flagpoles, and then appearing in one of his works.
Philip Tinari