Liang Yuanwei, Piece of life-No.12,2006-2007,Oil on canvas,120x140cm.

Liang Yuanwei will be featured in the next solo exhibition in the main project space of Boers-Li Gallery , opening on May 30 and running through July 4. The project is entitled BLDG 115, RM 1904.

Liang Yuanwei, a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Art originally from Xi’an born in 1977, is a young artist whose photography, painting, and installation work often focuses on articulating the sites of both beauty and oppression in the semiotics of the everyday. As a member of the N12 group, she began organizing exhibitions and attracting international attention along with her peers while still a student.

Her most recent work has involved themes of discretion, secrecy, interpersonal communication, domesticity, and the affect produced therein. Significantly, she seems to claim that this affect is all that fills up the empty space that dominates domesticity and everyday life. Uniquely, her practice rejects the feminine specificity idealized by so many of her peers in favor of more broadly universal explorations of social themes.

Technically rigorous and often requiring extraordinary amounts of time and energy, Liang Yuanwei’s artistic practice forces her audience to re-inspect the subtle points of ecstasy and torture that make up the fabric of the everyday, leading to a rejection of easy answers in favor of a laborious reconstruction of the perceived environment.

This latest exhibition will feature a number of works from the artist’s A Piece of Life series, which takes the patterns and prints of the artist’s own clothing and fabric as its inspiration. The texturing is impeccable, with mellow colors creating a sensation of floating blossoms. The focus in these works, however, is above all on the meticulous process involved in their production.

The creation of these paintings required large amounts of patience and concentration. The artist started painting from one edge, working consistently in the same direction and progressing strip by strip, each day painting only a very narrow strip. Because the pattern remained incomplete at the end of each day, the artist was unable to anticipate what its final appearance would be. At the same time, she worked under constant fear: a single misplaced brushstroke or minor mistake would mean the failure of the whole piece. Because the previous day’s work was already dry, there would be no way to correct any mistakes other than starting over anew.

These paintings and their process act as a subtle reminder of resistance to the tyranny of the chaotic outside world, reclaiming habitable space through anticipation and tedium.