Under the Pines, Over the Clouds

Under the Pines, Over the Clouds is rooted in Xiaojing Yan’s Chinese heritage and her experience as an immigrant. Her explorations as an artist can be viewed through a similarly bifurcated lens: the forms and landscapes are equally as indebted to the artist’s cultural identity as they are to her empathy for the natural world.

Yan chooses materials based on their symbolic potential: pearls, pine needles, or Lingzhi mushrooms for instance. She activates their latent potential by composing them into complex, often unexpected forms. For Spirit Cloud, the artist uses over 33,000 freshwater pearls to create a luminous oscillating matrix that simultaneously evokes a cumulus cloud or a mushroom. In Mountain of Pines, the hazy, mountainous forms from traditional Chinese landscape painting are achieved by weaving thousands of pine needles through sheets of translucent gauze. For the Lingzhi Girl series, mushroom spores are mixed with wood chips before being set in a mould. The cast is then exposed to humidity and light to spur the mycelium to grow transforming the bust into a one-of-a-kind hybrid portrait that combines nature, science and art.

This uneasy balance between culture and nature is the tension at the heart of Yan’s artwork. On the one hand, her work seems modelled on the ideal of the “mind landscape” espoused in traditional Chinese landscape painting, where the pictorial and personal merge towards Zen-like form. On the other, Yan upsets these traditional modes by inserting pearls, pine needles and spores into her hybrid creations. In this manner she cedes human autonomy to a less predictable natural process. Yan’s work explores the ways in which nature, over time, can transcend culture.

– Ivan Jurakic