Contemporary painting has long been the subject of much thought and writing, and even more so in recent times. Hardly any other artistic medium is as popular while at the same time the subject of so much controversial public discussion. The reasons can be found mostly in the (subjective) observation and interpretation of the works of art, in which “the mood of the viewer”, die Gestimmtheit, as Walter Benjamin stated, plays a rather significant role.i
Thus painting is, from time to time, subjected to a kind of institutional "examination”, a scrutiny including accompanying publications, in order for its ubiquitous presence to be constantly recognised anew, even as the struggles of the past, and competition with photography, conceptual art, film and video or even performance have been overcome.
Beyond this, self-confident positions can be found that defy a zeitgeist claim, and work "against" the contemporary. Almost from obscurity, out of the shadows, these positions present paintings freed from explanations, more detached from the many doubts and conditions of their respective times, because, anyway, there is a painting for every age. In his well-known and later collected lectures, Roland Barthes referred to conditions of time with the statement: Das Zeitgenössische ist das Unzeitgemäße (contemporary is unmodern).ii
Yafeng Duan's painting is about a completely different kind of temporal being, and about encounters, touches, about the dissolution of color surfaces and, in the broadest sense, about color forms. It is therefore contemporary because the artist has distanced herself from her earlier years and its artistic conditions - but without blurring traces and elements from a past and traditionally-oriented landscape painting.
Yafeng Duan's works, some of which are large-scale, are abstract compositions, with which she approaches an inner world of colors and shapes. They are not representing anything; they are not representational abstractions, nor can any narrative picture structure be recognised. The construction of her pictures is, at first glance, freed from a meaning - but rather the process of painting is the result of a subjective decision, detached from the style of contemporary historical or even culturally conditioned artistic concepts, their development and classification.
Only the name of the artist refers to her origin. Yafeng Duan was born near Peking, where she studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 1999 to 2001. She then moved to Weimar to study at the Bauhaus University, and in 2011 completed her studies with Robert Lucander at the Berlin University of the Arts. It is initially only natural to look for cultural connections and references in Yafeng Duan's work. On the side of her father Duan Xin Ran, one of the most important masters of traditional Chinese ink painting, the artist had already practiced this art in her young years, and thereby also training her ability to observe nature, which has left (spiritual) traces in her work to this day.
Duan remarked in a conversation that her longing for other things, for Western art (history), grew from this artistic biography but also her familial environment.
Following this inner impulse and in preparation for her further artistic studies, she began to learn German at the Goethe Institute in Beijing. When she arrived in Germany some time later, she has said herself that during her studies she was confronted with a completely new and expanding understanding of art. She initially reacted with a radical inner withdrawal, only to better “understand" after three months.
The result: a series of abstract gestural drawings. For Yafeng Duan the experiment began with lines, non-representational spaces and the exploration of abstract worlds of images - at the same time, it was a detachment from the criteria and rules of her artistic roots. What remains is her experience with traditional Chinese painting and the lively and subtle relationship to nature; this remains recorded not only in new lines, but has also been developed more freely.
For Yafeng Duan, the line becomes a powerful expression of movement and tension, while at the same time is a form for overcoming her initial understanding of art.
What has changed is the reduction of the visible world to colors and shapes, and with it, her own artistic reality. In general, in traditional Chinese landscape painting, intensive pictoral composition through the excessive use of color played a rather subordinate role. Artists, rather, by keenly observing nature, endeavored to create an atmosphere with concrete images, depicting certain peculiarities or essences of beings.
On canvas, Duan's observations are recorded as stored experiences and perceptions, and become a game of abstract association. Not only does a new relationship begin, based on colors and shapes, but also a dialogue with inner images. In this way, she expands the external and aesthetic level of observation through deeply internalized insight and knowledge.
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In Yafeng Duan's work, associative and rather fleeting references can be made to the beginnings of abstraction and thus to Wassily Kandinsky, who, as a pioneer in this field, declared in his 1911 writings “On the Spiritual in Art” that colors and forms are the actual means by which artists express an inner world in painting.iii
Duan's initial aim is not to quote or update the origins of abstract painting; rather, her methodical approaches from the beginning of her “artistic journey” until today reflect the traces and references that determine the development of the 20th century through to the New Abstraction of the 1990s. According to her own statement, she uses the European materials for new possibilities and painting techniques, for example to give her pictures a haptic quality and physical presence.
In particular, her so-called Dark Paintings are influenced by the color fields of the Danish painter and Neo-Expressionist Per Kirkeby, who, conditioned by his studies in geology, allows viewers themselves, to, as geologists, observe layers and colors. One could speculate about kinship spirits:
Both artists share an approach to the worldly, the observation of what happens in nature, its aura and atmosphere - yet neither paints abstract landscapes. Rather, experiences are set aside, transformed into forms of memory on the painted surfaces via an artistic abstraction processes of applying layers of paint, some of which are repeatedly reapplied and worn away, as are traces from the body's own memory - close together and right up to the clearly defined edges of the canvas. With the alternating arrangement and exchange of materially different colored surfaces, time sequences are simultaneously stored.
With artistic abstraction and suggestive gestures, at first glance only associations with natural formations, fragments and deposits remain. In terms of form and content, the fields of color between transformation and change create new connections, in the resulting artistic investigations as well as that of an inner expression in which movement and time are inscribed.
The images function like a kind of seismographic recording of sensory impressions- an attempt to represent the invisible.
Yafeng Duan's intuitive and at the same time controlled application of color and paint alternates here between the powerful various sizes of color fields, the strong, sculptural brushstrokes reminiscent of earthy formations, and fine translucent, watery layers of paint. The artist layers and spreads the oil paint, smudges it to renew areas, or uses the drying time of the material for further changes. The colors seem to develop a life of their own. On the flat canvas there are encounters of color overlaps, and nuances and forms. At their constructed or even open boundaries, they do not always complement each other; tensions arise between the lines and fields.
The color surfaces follow no definite system of order, but rather an intuitive treatment and the subjective perception of the artist. Nevertheless, at times, after several spatial superimpositions of different opaque surfaces, they seem to correspond side-by-side in a certain pausing and harmonious way. This material interplay of layers of paint, which in some places also merge into one another, sometimes leaves several visible traces in the color fields that become vivid, graphic.
The painting process, equally determined by chance and change, reveals spaces that reveal themselves only when the images are viewed in the mind over a longer period of time. Not all of them remain. Some deform, disappear, or seem to dissolve entirely from their boundaries and from the edges of the "living" canvases. In the emptiness left behind, atmospheric pictorial spaces increasingly grow - to be increasingly observed in the current group of works, which the artist assigns to the so-called Bright Pictures. One’s initial impression of the strong overall work changes with the more fluid application of paint which soothes the eyes. Your attention and imagination is stimulated with the reduced artistic means.
They seem infinitely deep and much more mysterious than the Dark Pictures. When trying to find an objective orientation, the viewer loses himself in an aesthetic experience - or, to put it more personally: "in a perceived space of experience that reflects the mood of nature", as Duan described in a conversation about her experience and painting. It is the multi-layered representation of her own perception of nature, which via reception means not only a formal external confrontation, but at the same time, the image leads an atmospheric-spatial experience from within. Gernot Böhme observes in his essay Atmosphere as the Basic Concept of a New Aesthetic, a reality of the work of art of its own, with which one has an experience in which the atmosphere of the picture cannot be ignored.iv Walter Benjamin had already written in his highly acclaimed article The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility on the property of the uniqueness of works of art, the experience of nature, and the context of an inaccessible aura that can be experienced in its perception. An aura that you “breathe” is sparked by the mood of nature and the state of mind of the beholder.v
These are paintings in which gravity is suspended, and in which one can live and breathe, Yafeng Duan explained during a visit to her studio. Through the artistic process, she transfers the breathing and experiences of natural things onto the surfaces, so to speak. The centuries-old Chinese life principle Qi prevails, not only in traditional painting, but in Duan’s artist's expression. Qi creates atmosphere.
In Yafeng Duan's work, aspects of this invisible Qi flow consciously and intuitively with the brush vibrations of the lines and colored surfaces into the pictorial spaces in which the force of gravity seems to have dissolved.
Aspects of this invisible Qi flow in Yafeng Duan's work, consciously and intuitively with the brush oscillations of the lines and color in the artistic spaces, in which gravity seems to be dissolved. They seem like free energy fields that remain in motion. Qi is a central and ambiguous term from Daoismvi with its dualistic philosophical principle of yin and yang. It refers to the flowing life force that has its expressions not only in art, but in all aspects of life.
Duan uses Qi in her painting practice as a kind of (meditative) technique, which at the same time serves as a tool with which she expands the multilayered, composed color spaces. This inner power is collected and stored in the paintings. Whereas in some of the earlier Dark Paintings, one recognises overlays of related and mutually-composed color fields, this play of abstract, powerful and tense interlocking surfaces dissolve in favor of compositions of expanded boundaries and light-to-transparent layers of color. It seems that a different speed guides the brush. As gestural traces of organic-looking abstractions, the fragile forms in the bright pictorial spaces lose their relationships to each other, and in this way simultaneously react more strongly to the physical environment.
The white canvas remains visible like a radiant, untouched point of origin - an origin of spiritual form. The color white is symbolically charged, and not only in Western art history - it is the color of infinity, a mystical and perfect hue. White is the brightest of all colors and represents light, purity and fulfillment.vii
According to traditional Chinese belief, all natural phenomena can be traced back to five elements: Fire, Earth, Wood, Metal and Water. Each of these elements is associated with a color: Black for water, red for fire, green for wood, yellow for earth and white for metal. With five elements, these five basic Chinese colors have found their way into almost all areas of life.
The oscillating compositions on Yafeng Duan’s canvases develop their very own boundless and uncontrolled dynamic on the predominantly bright and empty picture surfaces - their stillness is lifted by a diffuse play of light. The motifs create the impression of rhythmically gentle encounters: the pastel-colored abstractions become subtle and imaginary sound compositions: hearing by seeing. Looking at the surfaces, an inner relationship with the work of art develops. Sounds are acoustic perceptions and initially abstract experiences. Yafeng Duan activates the senses with artistic instruments. Images, sounds and movement become a contemplative unity: contemplation as communication. The impression is given that the pictures in fact lived and breathed. Symmetry would presumably bring this realization to a standstill again.
The proximity to the informal and the flirtation with chaos from the early years of her artistic work, sometimes reminiscent of abstract expressionism, dissolves in Yafeng Duan's current group of works in favor of a harmonious, almost meditative mood. The earlier color configurations and lines are strongly reduced, slowing down to semi-transparent energy fields. Here, the artistic work serves to regain the respective spiritual existence with painting. Today, the spiritual dimension in contemporary art is not so much a manifesto or even a longing for social utopias, but rather a visual record of differently motivated and individual research, combined with the physical experiences of artists. The dualism of mind and body is transferred into the artistic medium via perceptual processes and sometimes invisible actions.
In Yafeng Duan's vocabulary of shapes and forms, there are only a few trace elements, only distant memories of traditional Chinese ink painting. A clear cultural identity is quickly lost in the luminous, boundless spaces of color and sound, and opens her painting to indefinite experiences. Yafeng Duan stands for a position that finds free artistic expression, far from political discourse. The color runs, on the other hand, become a subjective game of association in which the possibility of ambiguity remains. Her painting does not want to represent anything: Rather, it is a personal decision and at the same time an attempt to use artistic means to approach her own reality. They are variations of mental, inner states and the result of observations and experiences of nature, with which the tension between line, color and surface is negotiated. In this way, Duan allows atmospheric spaces to alternate, grow and disappear at the same time in the painted surfaces - thus connecting the hidden interior with the material exterior. She allows soulfulness to flow into her paintings, and also to flow out of them.
Over the course of the past years, an extensive oeuvre has been created, an exploration of the ways in which the intense relationship to nature can be sounded out, artistically transmitted into abstract color fields and line constellations in a lively way. As long-lasting traces of collected knowledge, they flow into the works of almost unearthly grace, titled simply with numbers. It is painting that need not assert itself against the daily flood of images.
