In Liang Yuanwei's eponymous exhibition presented at Beijing Commune, she presents her latest artistic trajectory that she has been exploring since 2018. Throughout this journey, materiality and form have gone beyond color and structure, so that, the perceptions hidden within the painting itself could fully emerge. This exhibition reflects not simply how the artist investigates the civilized history and experiences contemporary discourses, but how she constantly positions herself in the relation to the former. Liang Yuanwei inaugurated her career at a time when a multitudes of cultures that included academic realism, symbolism, and a tendency toward grand narratives that map out the Chinese counterparty art scene was at its peak. Against the backdrop of globalization, Liang Yuanwei became one of this new generation who not only situated everydayness and individualism in the framework but also thrived for more detailed and specific aspects around such topics. It is not the represented narrative but how progress itself becomes the outcome that underlies Liang Yuanwei’s painting trajectory. This has further led her to a more thorough and critical exploration of the dynamics and interrelations between concept and form. Liang Yuanwei repetitively responds to temporality, materiality, and individual experience through her works that are based upon logic, continuity, and integrity.
To continually adapt to social and historical movements by immersing oneself within them has always been Liang Yuanwei’s priority. As an everyday object often seen in her paintings, the flower is not so much seen as a natural object but rather as the pattern widely printed on fabrics as the products of industrialization and consumerism, and as artificial objects given with multiple layers of social contexts. Throughout the progress of re-appropriating such found objects, Liang Yuanwei constantly practices with and further expands both its original forms and their connotations. In her recently developed path, Liang Yuanwei has applied a much more intuitive and impressive visual language that is both carnal and social, shedding light upon private experiences as well as shared ones. The more the scale of the flower is enlarged, the less mediums are utilized, and the less modifications Liang Yuanwei applies. As the artist uses brutal and structural brushstrokes to gradually replace the subtle lines, she also unravels the fantasies by encouraging both herself and the spectators to confront the cruelty that lies at the core of art. From spontaneously perceiving and instrumentalizing theory to form an independent working system, to consciously emancipating the perceptions from such an increasingly formalized system, Liang Yuanwei aims to reach her true self which is reflected in this complex human world wherein fast-paced conditions take place. For her, as the cultural vessels from Europe and China are not meant to be coinciding but intertwining with one another in the nonlinear river of time, such eventful sparkles arising from the temporal flows in the history of human civilization are worth contemplating and delving deeper into.
