XINRAN YUAN: WATER AS A BURDEN: MAP

February 20 – March 6, 2016

ROOMSERVICE Gallery

Identified by the poetic quality of her work, Yuan’s multi-layered practice inquires into the ocean’s phenomenological possibilities and its ecological calamity. Spanning across sculpture, installation, printmaking, poetry and video, her work investigates our notions of territory and history in relation to our (in)ability to visualize the ocean beyond its surface.

Water as a Burden: Map exemplifies Yuan’s artistic syntax. Single elements rich in metaphoric value build upon each other until the accumulation blurs the separation between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Their placement and movement are reminiscent of the ancient practice of oriental calligraphy while functioning as contemporary means of personal cartography, attempting to articulate the notions of imaging and imagination, encounters and loss. Xinran Yuan ‘writes’ a visual ballad with objects that she finds and others that she makes. In this installation, displaced objects figure as lone elements of a poem, holding the contradiction of a cerebral self-sufficiency and an interdependency grounded to the laws of physics.

About the artist

Born in Tianjin, China in 1987, Xinran Yuan has an A.B. degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, and an M.F.A. degree in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently a resident artist at the Center for Book Arts, New York, she has exhibited internationally in the U.S., Iceland, China, and Switzerland. This is her first solo exhibition in New York.