Back to Painting presents a new body of paintings by Xiaojing Yan, accompanied by a small selection of sculptural works made with pearls and cultivated mushrooms. The exhibition marks a renewed focus on painting while carrying forward Yan’s longstanding interest in natural systems, material transformation, and processes of growth and change.
Across Pine Current, Drift Field, and Unsettled Forms, recognizable natural references move in and out of abstraction. Pine needles become currents; lines drift across translucent fields; forms gather, dissolve, overlap, and reappear without settling into fixed identities. Washes bury earlier marks, stains redirect the composition, and drawn elements interrupt fields of colour. Rather than building toward a single focal point, each painting develops through a continual exchange between intention, material, and chance.
Yan approaches the canvas not simply as a surface on which to depict nature, but as a system in itself. One gesture alters the conditions for what follows, allowing the painting to evolve through accumulation, interruption, disappearance, and transformation. Rather than illustrating an ecosystem, the paintings are allowed to behave like one.
The accompanying pearl and lingzhi works extend these concerns into three dimensions, connecting the painted surface to Yan’s broader exploration of accumulation, cultivation, transformation, and the shifting boundary between natural process and human intervention.
All works from the exhibition are available for acquisition. We would be pleased to provide details and welcome you to the gallery.
We would be pleased to provide further information on any work included in the exhibition.
Xiaojing Yan is a China-born, Markham-based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and public art. Her work explores ecological systems, cultural memory, material transformation, and the ways living and constructed environments shape one another.
Drawing on Chinese aesthetic traditions, mythology, migration, and close observation of the natural world, Yan works with materials ranging from paint and ink to Lingzhi mushrooms, freshwater pearls, pine needles, cicada shells, plants, and paper. Across media, she is interested in processes of growth, accumulation, adaptation, and change, often allowing material behaviour, organic processes, and time to become active elements in the work.
After more than two decades focused primarily on sculpture and installation, Yan has recently returned to painting. Her new paintings extend the spatial and ecological thinking of her three-dimensional practice into layered fields of line, colour, gesture, and material process.
Yan’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Royal Ontario Museum, Suzhou Museum, Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Hermès Maison Shanghai, Sharjah Art Museum, Contemporary Calgary, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Her sculpture Lingzhi Girl appeared on the cover of Art in America, and her writing has been published in Leonardo by MIT Press.
Historical and Contemporary Gallery located in Toronto at 33 Hazelton Ave.
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