Jiaming YOU: Remnant of City and Flora: Curated by WANG Yaoli

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition, Remnant of City and Flora, by artist Jiaming You, from May 12 to June 9, 2024. Curated by Wang Yaoli, the exhibition features ten of You's latest works, focusing on the interaction between artificial natural elements and the urban environment, thereby exploring the complex relationship between the individual and their external surroundings.

You has long been interested in the relations between small individuals and the lived environment. While her previous works focused on portraying the state of individuals, her latest works shifted the eye to "natural landscapes" in urban areas with artificial traces. Spaces with "natural" attributes, such as botanical gardens, campsites, and greenhouses, are manufactured products that reflect humanity's renewed longing for nature after undergoing socialization and urbanization. Unlike primitive nature, urban landscapes often bear evident artificial traces and attempt to showcase a kind of human-specific visual aesthetics.

In this series of works, You draws inspiration from the commonplace "artificial nature" of life, placing indistinguishable figures in the background of the composition or blending them with the environment, thus amplifying the presence of "nature". The seemingly scattered and pieced-together images, with deliberate traces of human intervention, evoke an unexpected harmony and attractiveness. In the intermediate place where humans and nature shape each other, You, through painting, reassembles scattered threads of our lives, guiding us to re-examine and contemplate the ambiguous connections between humanity, society, and nature that cannot be severed entirely.