Bill Brady Gallery presents “Expanse,” a solo exhibition of artist Yuan Fang (b. 1996, Shenzhen) in Los Angeles. Featuring eleven recent works, the show marks the artist’s second showing with the gallery, and her debut solo exhibition on the West Coast.

Division, elimination, acceleration, compression, proliferation. Despite the visual resonance shared with the vanguard lineage of twentieth-century painting, Yuan’s restless configurations of spatial planes and perceived depths often perturb the historic term “abstraction,” and its cerebral detachment from bodily sensations and lived experiences. Taking the vantage points of a concealed body, or multiple bodies, each work invites viewers to take part in the physical absorption into unknown territories, and their emergence from the succession of events and effects. The paintings allegorize the human body’s accelerated entry into the virtual, and its subsequent exile from the real.

The eleven works on view are the artist’s most intensive explorations of human physiognomy and its negotiated existence in the rationalistic space of the rectilinear canvas. Drastically expanding the scale of her canvases, Yuan begins with preliminary drawings, and relies on improvisation and on-site responses to resolve the conflicts of spaces. As such, the act of painting involves the constant negotiation to narrate the expired motions of the body. The success, or the failure to locate the fleeting bodies can be deeply allegorical, and even autobiographical.

–– Felix Ho Yuen Chan