BEIJING.- Wanwan Lei projects presents its second exhibition of new paintings by Bodu Yang. Born in China and educated at the MFA program at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Yang’s paintings explore the effects of appropriation and the visual, political and sensory considerations surrounding the increasingly methodized practices of mounting art- works for viewing.

In her second exhibition, Yang continues her pensive, luminous portrayals of interior spac- es and her exploration of the politics of viewing art on display. She airlifts the audience from the familiar reality of the international art scene into an imagined environment occu- pied solely by the artwork itself and the viewer, requesting us to claim intensely private ter- ritories in a public, abstractly defined space. Her new canvases introduce more populated settings of meticulously positioned objects that both outline and mystify the viewer’s posi- tion, and suggest almost tangible qualities for the immaterial gaze itself. Quietly interact- ing fields of harmonious, serene colors are unsettled by bold negative spaces that introduce a subtle, salient and at times gently ominous sense of instability. Her aesthetics can be readily linked to Hubert Robert’s painting of the Louvre or Thomas Struth’s photographs of museum scenes, but more importantly they offer a refreshing, youthful and informed perspective on our current attitude towards the lineage of art history; the viewer is only permitted examine artworks portrayed in these paintings from the distance, direction and degree of intimacy prescribed by Yang. Her paintings are directly informed by her experi- ences witnessing the changing politics of museums in America and China’s museums-in- progress, and raise questions about cultural and sociological impact of the changing and burgeoning global “art scene”.

The exhibition locates in an apartment in the Diplomatic Compound complex in Sanlitun, an area in Beijing which is now almost forgotten as an art venue where underground art scenes often took place in the 1980s and early ‘90s.