Camera Falls Down Karesansui

In a sense, the Karesansui has the aesthetic taste of "mono no aware", and the fall of the camera as a modern imaging machine seems to form a conflicting combination of words. Camera Falls Down Karesansui is the title of a group of works that artist Yan Lei once exhibited in Japan. This group of works uses words as the main body of creation, with layered and sexy Japanese words and sentences printed on black paper, yellow envelopes and framed photos randomly purchased from antique stores in a typographic gravure method. The words and phrases are felt by the artist's daily impressions, and they are very picturesque, or they are images in themselves, and they form a peculiar relationship with the hidden images behind them.

Yan Lei's image practice has an indescribable intuitive experience. Another group of works in this exhibition is the Color Wheel series. He set up an orderly pattern of concentric circles of color changes according to a specific logic, and handed it over to a certain production system to complete it, just like the assembly line of a factory; but he is not trying to do research on color systems, nor is it just out of subversion of the author's autonomy. In his novel Color Wheel Usual Manual, we can see that the "color wheel" and the totemic circle painting of tribal people and the iron rings played in childhood constitute a kind of intuitive connection across time and space. This kind of connection is not only in the form of external, but a certain image symbol "validates" in its own context. When we cross this heavy fog of context, we will wake up: art is just "a collective game about creating something out of nothing". When we connect the separation of light and color with the disappearance of life, we will have another look at the spiritual meaning of images in the modern mechanical production chain.

Light and color, black and white, image and text, seem to be groups of opposites, but they can be converted at any time. Another work in this exhibition is a reproduction of an old work closely related to the Pearl River Delta. The tortoise cast with the black mud of the Pearl River is combined with the rotating dining table supporting the high-tech products of the Pearl River Delta. The slow speed of the tortoise and the take-off of economy and technology form another conflict relationship. At the same time, the locality of geography and diet is mixed. However, these multiple relationships that can be stated may not be what Yan Lei is concerned with. As he said, "I believe that art exists outside the language of the work (object and presentation)", and he regards "the artist's overall handling of the work as art". Therefore, those intricate relationship connections and conflicts are included in his works, but not all of them. He hopes to reveal the spiritual illusion of art and the secrets beyond the rules in the "stirring" of this relationship. The way to arrive is all under the watchful eye of his keen intuition and method.

——Curator Hu Bin