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Yanhua Feng (b.1965, Tianjin) is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received a B.A. from the
Central Academy of Arts and Design (now the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua
University) in 1993. Drawing from the visual language of Rococo painting, her work reactivates
historically marginalized aesthetic values, including pleasure, ornament, sensuality, and
intimacy, through abstraction, creating sensuous, layered surfaces that invite new ways of
looking.
“Looking depends on certainty. We recognize a body because its edges remain intact; we
understand a narrative because its figures hold together. My paintings begin where that
certainty starts to dissolve. Bodies merge with ornament, flesh slips into landscape, and
gestures gather only to disperse again. What appears familiar ever fully settles into
recognition, leaving looking suspended between knowing and imagining.
I return to Rococo painting because it offers a visual languge shaped by ornament, pleasure,
sensuality, intimacy , and excess - qualities that have long occupied an uneasy position
within art history, often dismissed as frivolous, decorative, or excessively feminine. Rather
thanreconstructing Rococo imagery, I used abstraction to reactive these historically
marginalized aesthetic values. Lush, fragmented brushwork and accumulated layers of paint
destablize fixed forms, allowing bodies to remain fluid, provisional, and unresolved. For me,
disorientation is not the absence of meaning, but the suspension of certainity through which
new ways of looking emerge.
Abstraction does not obscure experience; it slows it down. The material movement of paint
resists immediate recognition and invites sustained attention. Looking becomes less an act
of identification than one of hesitation, reorientation, and sensory engagement. Instead of
resolving ambiguity, the paintings invite viewers to remain within it, where meaning continues
to shift and pleasure emerges through the rleationship between seeing, sensing, and imagining.”