Xuanlin Ye: Bamboo in My Chest
The title itself derives from an idiom, a famous Chinese saying meant to describe a person with clear goals. Translated by the painter Xuanlin Ye to express an inner clarity about who he is artistically, and how where he comes from informs the brash imagery of his subject matter otherwise exotic as well as esoteric to the Western worldview.
For him, the phrase also asks the complex question of what does it mean to be from another painterly tradition, culture and history outside of the usual Eurocentric influence.
Navigating the in-between of the classically folkloric and the globalized contemporary, he coolly dons an Imperial robe from the Celestial Throne as if an ordinary apron, to conjure up a new order, his vision of the Dragon Millennium, skillfully conflating East and West into a metaphysical and mythical place frozen in pictorial time where the past is indistinguishable from the future now in our present.
And what transpires on canvas then becomes his Journey to the West, a visual record into the mind of the artist as Monkey King in sfumato coming and going home.
Photo credit: Guanyu Xu