Two minds = one work, two tensions = one rapport.

Collaborations take up a vital position in visual art since the early 50s where we have the famous case of Robert Rauschenbergs 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing.1 While we have artists grouping together to collate common interest and ideas to express an artistic agenda, there are also individuals who are drawn to a particular cause to take on realities that exist within the visual art arena. Through the act of collaborating, the association of individuals begin to interconnect, deriving differences and similarities in narratives and modes of expression.

Sparkling Double relates to the unique collaborative fusion between Yan Lei’s visions with two languages, one being the sprayed and stenciled markings of graffiti and the second, CRYSTALLIZED – Swarovski Elements. Attempting to explore the processes shared between each other and of their own, what is produced reflects on inter-textual experiences, based on interpretations and re-interpretations of images produced.

This exhibition is segmented into three components. The first is a roomful of assorted paintings created by Yan Lei in the past two years. To make a reflection is how one could possibly describe the artist’s nonchalant approach towards his paintings. The artist is known to capture and document extensively through his camera, wherever his trips take him to; usually images that are either personal or etched within a particular context that is often related to cultural realities. As he has once expressed, “Painting is after all a mindless re-presentation of an image you might see in a photograph. The process of making that painting has become superfluous.”2

The artist went on to select and transfer the photos onto his canvases, moving into unassuming evocations of pictorial diaries that are formally direct, intriguing in shade and tone, and often elliptical in thematic emphasis. It could just be paintings based on reproducing other artists’ seminal works, curatorial figures he worked with, postcard-like imageries of certain landscapes and periods and portraitures of significant personalities. Like a wandering soul caught up in the whirlwinds of the global art arena, Yan Lei, however, still attempts to maintain shrewd perspectives towards contextual behaviours and circumstances and playing with significations between cultural expressions and daily narratives.

The second component of the exhibition is an equally monopolisation of two artistic expressions within one panel. Hong Kong remains a special place in his heart for Yan Lei for he had once briefly lived and worked there. Much integrated into the Hong Kong art community, the artist had built alliance and friendship with some of the local artists. For this show, Yan Lei has called upon his Hong Kong friend and fellow artist, Syan, better known as MC Yan in Hong Kong’s contemporary culture scene, about the possibility of creating spontaneously on his paintings.

Bringing along his arrays of spray cans and self-made markers, some of which were created using a mixture of liquid shoe polish and special solvents, MC Yan tagged the chosen paintings with motifs of archetypical Chinese courtyards with back gardens. There are also compositions that only feature the graffiti signature of MC Yan, overlapped against the appropriated images in Yan Lei’s paintings. By the very action of their teamed artworks, a dialogue is unavoidable concerning the transitory nature of authorship. Meanings shift, visions code and recode. The photo-copied style of Yan Lei’s paintings has been in turned subverted by repeated graphic sequences in MC Yan’s sprayed markings.

The dynamism of hues in these paintings, paint colours that are custom-produced in all of Yan Lei’s works, and the different graffiti techniques applied by MC Yan constitute greatly to the nature of the final expression. Thus, the exploration here challenges both artist’s ebb and flow of ideas, which in turn, questions the characteristic of whether can or should an artwork be qualified to exist only in accordance to one artist’s own style/discourse or not.

12 paintings were completed and the end results reflected a profundity in which both artists accept the individuality of each other with openness and shared inspiration. There is the hybridity of which something new, created by mixture of qualitative ideas and styles, co-exists to generate a visual language different from any of their own previous creations.

The final component of the exhibition involves only two but intricately-constructed sculptural works that were made with CRYSTALLIZED – Swarovski Elements.

The shape of a cross is made up of 4 words: SEX, SPEED, SUCK, SHOW – linked up by an enlarged S in the middle. This sculpture marries a traditional iconography, once reserved only for religious purposes but is now commonly associated with popular culture, with the artist’s own Pop propaganda of “Eternal Value”, a crystal slogan created by Yan Lei made with CRYSTALLIZED – Swarovski Elements. The entire piece is made up of large crystals in addition to a red glow emanating from within the back. An attention-grabber for sure, the sculpture aptly questions the current belief system of an increasingly profuse self-glamorised societies, a common denominator that we, as perpetual consumers, are all part of.

The other sculpture is simply a heart-shaped mirror with the same 4 words carved out in the center with tiny CRYSTALLIZED – Swarovski Elements, while neon glow surrounds the back of the piece. This artwork plays a complementary role to the accompanying sculpture in that when standing in front of it, the mirroring of oneself creates a notion of the ideal versus the reality. Put together, the two sculptures are capable of stirring a complex, yet sensuous, representation of individual phenomena.

Duality and Unity, first described by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Director and Chief Curator of Aspen Art Museum, of themes that emerged in Yan Lei’s strategies, are exactly in play in this exhibition. The double ‘surfaces’ that sparkle in the artworks called to attention Yan Lei’s evocation of signature, style and self. It is in the collaborative processes that are stemmed more from a keen consent to empower the act of artistic liberation within himself and the involved partners. Which, ultimately, lead us into the notion of the mutable nature in artistic identity itself.

Josef Ng