Everyday Poetic Conception: The Memory Zone of Su Yabi

Curator: Luo Fei
Artist: Su Yabi
Art Review: Liao Wen
Artistic Support: Sun Guojuan
Opening Reception: 8pm, Nov 8th 2014
Exhibition Duration: Nov 8th to Dec 3rd 2014
TCG Nordica Gallery, Chuangku, xibalu 101, Kunming
Host by TCG Nordica
Co-sponsor: Fine Art Academy of Dali Collage
Tel: 0871-64114692

The Poetic World of Everyday Life – The Memory Zone of Su Yabi

by Liao Wen

In the summer of 2002, I went to Dali to avoid summer hotness. Guojuan Sun, an artist in Kunming, advised me to visit a girl named Su Yabi , whose paintings are very special. Judging from my common sense, a place named “Xiaguan” must be a natural vital water and land communication line, however when I finally arrived at Xiaguan of Dali after spending several hours on a long-distance bus, I hardly connected the scene in front of me with my former imagination.

In my memory, Xiaguan in those years was just a small town full of a large stretch of messy simple buildings, which appeared extraordinarily higgledy-piggledy scattered in the bright and beautiful Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake.Su Yabi showed me around the small town which she lived in; I habitually mobilized all my senses to feel this new place. With my special curiosity and observation, I often can see something that is invisible to others, but the small town left me was nothing but lack of aesthetic characters. Nothing was eye-catching for me.

At that time, she was a recent college graduate, and was sharing a building of a battery plant with a few young artists to draw in. The building was almost empty with a few crooked cement pillars. The white lime walls peeled off and scattered here and there. Water even lingered in the hollow parts of the uneven cement ground. The security window welded up in scrap metal materials ruthlessly cut the blue sky and white clouds into pieces. Paintings by these young artists were placed against the wall, all in dim colors and without clear dividing lines
To my surprise, this crushed aesthetic system and embarrassing scene looks extraordinarily superb in her paintings. She touched and described the daily things like wardrobes, beds, light bulbs, locks, dresses, scarves, umbrellas, combs, brushes, slippers, brooches from a unique perspective, and also the iron railing through the security window, the pipe, the high tension line, television tower, building, automobile, faucet and other things that were visible from inside to outside, the underwear, tooth mug, thermos, clocks, chairs that could be seen from the outside. They were scattering desultorily in the picture and even the modeling, proportion, color, and position seemed less reasonable (Some were almost floating in the air), but as a whole they were completely enveloped in a fine, soft, simple atmosphere. The tone of her paintings she selected was like faded old photos. Occasionally she also abstemiously used gray monochrome color, which resembled colored old photos. Her style of painting was fuzzy, plane, and carefree, as if she casually touched the petty objects in her memory, letting her feeling flow like mist. It was in mediocre and trivial everyday that she endowed them with a poetic world. She named these works as ‘Everyday Memory’, she said: “I have been recording the moments of my life and the scenes I experienced in a visual way to restore the relaxation and simplicity of their own in limited colors to draw in the canvas”.

Afterwards, she began to weave the day-to-day objects she used to draw repeatedly for many years with a fine flexible metal wire, turning plane brushwork into three-dimensional knit. Knit is the most familiar way to women, for their daily life is closely-related with it; they weave clothes with thread, articles for daily use with bamboo, and love with emotions. Weaving for women is not only a kind of making method, but a way of life. Despite the objects she made with metal wire appeared blank and dazzling as if they were emptied out, the vaguely-outlined objects woven with shiny and burnished metal wires one by one that are tangible and visible are closely-knitted with daily life. I guess these images combining virtual and actual characters are more close to her memory, and weaving is like a spiritual practice, just as she said: “many of my memory can be retrieved”, which are closest to her state of mind.

Actually, whether painting or weaving, for Su Yabi , the relationship between mood and feeling is the same. And some of her works blending with both skills are more exquisite and rich visually and sensuously.

A wave of warmth swept through my heart whenever I enjoyed her works. In a time full of chaotic information and farraginous values, she still keeps a poetic state of mind and curiosity about the most mediocre town and the ordinary daily life. There must be a supernormal beautiful mind filled with fragrance and emotion.

In September 2014 in Songzhuang, Beijing

A Sense of Poetry Emerging in the Everyday

By Luo Fei

In the eyes of many people, art seems to be “useless,” however, as for me, the reason why I hold that art is “useful”, is that the artists open a new window for us, enabling us to see the extraordinary from the ordinary, to see the reality hided in the little trivial daily experiences which is namely the poetic reality. These artworks filled with poetic realities tend to remind people to slow down to reflect the surroundings, and then to give feedback to the heart, then the inner turbulent can be expressed through the specific form such as art.

Spiritual expression is the common concern of some local artists. Through description of the mind and inquiry, the artists transformed from craftsman to the soul watchmen. Su Yabi from Dali is such an artist. She graduated from Yunnan Arts University in 1998, majored in oil painting. Since the university times , she has been fascinated by the everyday things in the room, such as the hairbrushes used dust removals, pins, wardrobes, combs, dresses, dressers and other household items. She, in the form of painting and knitting iron wire, endowed these everyday objects with personal emotion and mind, and wove layers of poetic reality.

As far as I m concerned, the poetic feeling in her painting is a mild sense of drift. The daily things in her pictures show kind of weightless feeling. They impress people with the images slowly drifting and then rising in the air. The dresses seem to be in wonderland, the scarf flood like the tide, the sharpest head of the pins are always reluctant to hide. These items run away from the drawers and closets, which seems to get rid of the restrictions of established order and center to seek more freedom. All these are carried out in a gentle way, even in the form of memory to describe the state of their disobedience. Because in the pictures we always encounter the same items closely related to the deepest memory of the artiest. They struggle for freedom from the institutionalized space lack of imagination. This kind of “fleeing from the reality” is not only a way to show disobedience but also a kind of drifting.

That’s the reason why I said these items are in possession with mind and become the symbols of the states of being. In her art, I saw that people as a being to present the poetic feeling and resist meaningless existence, that human as a being of pursuing freedom and fighting against the fate, that man as a being that go beyond the material world and disobey alienation. At this level, the art, in a seemingly useless way, impacted us to the greatest extent, that is, it ensures man as spiritual being, and by which arouse the same sympathy and strike a responsive chord among people.

Just need to slow down, gaze for a minute, and listen to the heart with her. Then you will feel a sense of poetry emerging in the everyday.

On the night of October 16 2014