Project Room HK —
Ye Linghan: Floating Spring

Ben Brown Fine Arts is honored to present the first solo exhibition of works by Ye Linghan in the Project Room at our Hong Kong gallery.  Ye Linghan, age 27, attended the prestigious China Academy of Art in Hangzhou where he studied traditional mural painting and drawing, his academic training evident in the many works on paper included in the exhibition.  After finishing his studies, Ye Linghan lived and worked in Hangzhou and Shanghai and recently relocated his studio to Beijing, near the 798 arts district.  Ye Linghan's multi-media work has garnered great acclaim and attention recently-last year alone he was included in over 25 exhibitions, at venues such as the Minsheng Art Museum, MOCA Shanghai and the Today Art Museum in Beijing.

The current exhibition includes a film and photographs from his The Spring of a Small Town series.  Spring in a Small Town, a romance/drama produced in 1948, is China's most famous and widely celebrated film.  Ye Linghan has altered the film by blurring the actors so that the focus is taken away from the narrative and biographical and instead cast upon the small and disparate details of this highly recognizable and nostalgic film.  He has then taken stills from his re-appropriated film and made unique photographs that are exhibited in groups of five or twenty.  These lyrical, anonymous and highly evocative black and white photographs are not arranged chronologically; rather Ye Linghan prefers that the viewer create his own sequence and meaning with the works.  Also included in the exhibition is a series of watercolors and gouaches on paper that explores the formal and metaphorical qualities of whales and airships, two seemingly incongruous objects.  Ye Linghan gracefully presents a relationship between these floating, silent and autonomous objects of the sea and sky, substituting one for the other in his meditative grids and large, singular works.  Ye Linghan has mastered the challenging technique of ink and watercolor painting with these ethereal grisaille forms that hover on sheets of white paper; many of these images appear in his short film Last Experimental Flying Object, also included in the exhibition.

Ye Linghan was included in a group show entitled The Other Wave: Contemporary Chinese Photography at Ben Brown Fine Arts London in 2011.