Bai Yiyi: Comet Drifting Away
Past exhibition
Overview
In those humble times, no one’s name will be remembered. Heart fulfilled, photos taken, and can we still murmur any memories? – Kidney "Where is love?"
BANK is honored to present 'Comet Drifting Away', Bai Yiyi's debut solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Shanghai. In this fleet of large-scale works on canvas, Bai processes the cacophony of information that ebbs and flows through the mental horizon of contemporary society, harnessing its fleeting details and weaving them into all-over compositions. The artist attempts to map an inaccessible notion of home in these seemingly abstract pictures. They are cartographic explorations of our glitch culture - tracing data in a state of accelerated bliss as it collides with the shattered surfaces of consumer materiality, organic matter, and memory until they are fixed together into hyper object or an imagined landscape of the Anthropocene.
Wherever "I" have lived is my hometown, and "Where is home" is a proposition that represents the disorder of contemporaneity - floating populations, fluctuation, anxiety, the precariat, and uncertainty. As the first generation to grow up in the era of the Internet, the artist attempts to piece together reality from within the paradigm of the network. In this highly fragmented, nonlinear assault of ideas, factual checks and balances grow increasingly tenuous. Bai asks from where we come, what our coordinates are, and to which side of the virtual real divide we belong.The artist was born and raised in the factory zones of northern China, which, through political and economic fluctuation, have since been rendered defunct, irrelevant, nonexistent. He has become a wanderer searching for his roots through these relics of modernity, in childhood memories, in crowds, and the vastness of the Internet. His paintings are enablers; through them, he is able to understand the relationship between "I" and the external real world and the relationship between "I" and the cybernetic world of screens, rapid-fire images, and information. It is a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a subject's unity and its plurality somehow partially disintegrates.
In Bai's paintings, the outlines of specific groups of people disappear, and their identities and social symbols become ambiguous, like images that circulate in the world of social networks, where the original is blurred in the process of spreading, and the information gradually dissolves until it disappears. The artist tries to establish the logic of his own painting creation by using the industrialized aesthetics of communication. Inspired by Richter's photo painting, he destroys the physical boundaries of the image by blurring the contours in the picture, thus creating a hazy, open-ended storyline much like the video picture.
In the exhibited works, the hidden or visible skin and clothes become a mysterious clue, stacked by the artist’s hand with the visual memory of figurative images using pointillism to fit the visual language of electronic screen imaging. Brush pointillism mimics the color dots of advertisement offset printing, the video snowflake, and zoomed-in feature footage, etc. The fictionalized image in the stacked image parellels that in the video painting. Stories and scenarios are fictionalized and fantasized in the stacked images to form narratives, creating images that have a high-speed fluidity and sensuality like fashion blockbusters and advertising images. Through this exhibition, the artist tries to find a "meta-narrative" in the rootless world of reality and internet.
As the artist puts it, "this world is like a desert built by the explosion of images." He looks at the earth and searches for riveting points, making and correcting the reality of memory through the spectrum of the Internet's visual landscape. How is it possible that each of our memories is swallowed up by the world that changes its size and shape at any time? Only the skin, if any, is evidence of the real.
BANK is honored to present 'Comet Drifting Away', Bai Yiyi's debut solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Shanghai. In this fleet of large-scale works on canvas, Bai processes the cacophony of information that ebbs and flows through the mental horizon of contemporary society, harnessing its fleeting details and weaving them into all-over compositions. The artist attempts to map an inaccessible notion of home in these seemingly abstract pictures. They are cartographic explorations of our glitch culture - tracing data in a state of accelerated bliss as it collides with the shattered surfaces of consumer materiality, organic matter, and memory until they are fixed together into hyper object or an imagined landscape of the Anthropocene.
Wherever "I" have lived is my hometown, and "Where is home" is a proposition that represents the disorder of contemporaneity - floating populations, fluctuation, anxiety, the precariat, and uncertainty. As the first generation to grow up in the era of the Internet, the artist attempts to piece together reality from within the paradigm of the network. In this highly fragmented, nonlinear assault of ideas, factual checks and balances grow increasingly tenuous. Bai asks from where we come, what our coordinates are, and to which side of the virtual real divide we belong.The artist was born and raised in the factory zones of northern China, which, through political and economic fluctuation, have since been rendered defunct, irrelevant, nonexistent. He has become a wanderer searching for his roots through these relics of modernity, in childhood memories, in crowds, and the vastness of the Internet. His paintings are enablers; through them, he is able to understand the relationship between "I" and the external real world and the relationship between "I" and the cybernetic world of screens, rapid-fire images, and information. It is a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a subject's unity and its plurality somehow partially disintegrates.
In Bai's paintings, the outlines of specific groups of people disappear, and their identities and social symbols become ambiguous, like images that circulate in the world of social networks, where the original is blurred in the process of spreading, and the information gradually dissolves until it disappears. The artist tries to establish the logic of his own painting creation by using the industrialized aesthetics of communication. Inspired by Richter's photo painting, he destroys the physical boundaries of the image by blurring the contours in the picture, thus creating a hazy, open-ended storyline much like the video picture.
In the exhibited works, the hidden or visible skin and clothes become a mysterious clue, stacked by the artist’s hand with the visual memory of figurative images using pointillism to fit the visual language of electronic screen imaging. Brush pointillism mimics the color dots of advertisement offset printing, the video snowflake, and zoomed-in feature footage, etc. The fictionalized image in the stacked image parellels that in the video painting. Stories and scenarios are fictionalized and fantasized in the stacked images to form narratives, creating images that have a high-speed fluidity and sensuality like fashion blockbusters and advertising images. Through this exhibition, the artist tries to find a "meta-narrative" in the rootless world of reality and internet.
As the artist puts it, "this world is like a desert built by the explosion of images." He looks at the earth and searches for riveting points, making and correcting the reality of memory through the spectrum of the Internet's visual landscape. How is it possible that each of our memories is swallowed up by the world that changes its size and shape at any time? Only the skin, if any, is evidence of the real.
Installation Views
Video
Works
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, A ring of glittering crowds 闪耀人群组成的环形场域 , 2024 -
Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, Both flowing information and spotlighting are theorized to affect visual analysis of emotions 流动的信息与聚光灯在理论上都会影响对情绪的视觉分析 , 2024
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, At a gentle curve I see a shimmering ethereal green landscape down into the body 在一个柔和的曲线处我看到闪闪发光的幽绿景观向下进入身体, 2023
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, Dawn after a long night of partying 彻夜狂欢后的黎明, 2024
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, Hack into the body and please respond to my infection 骇入躯体并请对我的感染做出反应, 2024
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, Sinking from the Bottom into the Deep as an Experience of Divergence and Compromise 从最底处沉入深海作为一种对分歧与妥协的体验, 2023
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, Summer Night Light Scene 盛夏夜光景, 2024
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Bai Yiyi 白乂乂, Your physiques disintegrate like ripples and disappear into the jungle 你们的体态像涟漪般被分解并消失在丛林中, 2023
