Ye Zhaofeng: The Silent Fade of Everything

EVENT DESCRIPTION

SENS Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “The Silent Fade of Everything”, featuring the paintings of Chinese artist Ye Zhaofeng. The exhibition will open from 16 March to 20 April 2024. Curated by Zhang Yiying, the exhibition marks Ye’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, following his participation in the gallery’s inaugural booth at the Art021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair in November 2023. The exhibition is a selection of old and new works, visualizing the blurred boundaries that separate physical space from virtual reality.

Each painting highlights the ‘silent fade’ of society, reflecting on the young generations seeking technology to escape from the pressures placed upon them, compromising physical interactions for the digital. Ye’s paintings pay attention to the contradictions in our reality, keenly aware of the phenomenon that surrounds technology and how it has changed human history. There is at last one individual present, all of unique character, knowingly in ‘conversation’ with others. However, they are all ultimately enthralled in their own uses of technology instead of communicating with one another.

One of these contradictions is depicted in a series of works beginning with the title ‘gap’, encapsulating the invisible barrier that forms due to this effect. In the works ‘Living Space’, ‘Gap – Party’, and ‘Gap – Gathering’ (all 2024), Ye creates iconic scenarios where individuals are seated in a space merely functioned for interaction, but do not interact with one another physically, instead opting to use their digital assets to communicate. Ye’s work depicts technology being used as a means of seeking solace from the stress of reality. In these vast vacant spaces, characters feel a lingering feeling of solitude that emanates from the screens of their gadgets, forgetting about the stresses of the world.

Ye deftly expresses the disconnections and distances between individuals and the environments by emanating blurry, somewhat dystopian worlds that are illusionary in nature. In his strong brushstrokes, the artist enhances the discord between objects and the changing environment that surrounds them. Landscaped compositions are a feature in his work, where Ye synthesizes these spaces and locales to create an ideal, cinematic world encompassed by reality. These depictions of life and society encourages the audience to feel as if they are present in the scenes themselves.

“The Silent Fade of Everything” invites audiences to provoke thought on the impact of technology in society today. Ye Zhaofeng’s work explores a mind that longs for an ideal life, which is simultaneously near yet far, attempting to find balance in a stressful life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Born in Wuxi in 1996, Ye Zhaofeng graduated from the Affiliated High School of the China Academy of Art in 2015, and then entered the China Academy of Art, where he received his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from the Department of Oil Painting, and then stayed on to teach at the China Academy of Art after his graduation in 2021, where he now lives and works.

Ye's paintings illustrate the contradictions and conflicts that exist in our real lives, and he focuses on the significant changes that digital technology has made in the course of human history and the impact it has had on our lives. His paintings depict in a figurative way how we face and express our interactions with others through smart technology, which blurs the boundaries between physical space and virtual reality.

With strong strokes, Ye skilfully expresses the rupture and distance brought about by smart technology, blurring and visualizing the world one lives in, and enhancing the sense of conflict between the subject and the environment, embodying a unique sense of loneliness. It seems that the work depicts a state of life under smart technology, but behind the scenes Ye explores the mentality of an "ideal" life, which is both near and far, and tries to find a balance between the virtual and the real in the stressful life.