Gin YAO: The Silence Above Burning: Curated by WANG Yaoli
Stainless steel is the mirror of modern civilization; it wraps the heat of our era in a cold brightness. We know it as intimately as the order inscribed in the lines of our palms, yet seldom realize that its unfading silver-white sheen is in fact the crystallization of humanity’s obsession with resisting entropy. What we call eternity is nothing more than decay not yet revealed; what we call order will ultimately find its resting place in the embrace of disorder. — Gin YAO
BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition, The Silence Above Burning, by the artist Gin YAO, from September 13 to October 12 31, 2025. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the exhibition presents YAO’s recent paintings, installations, and photographic works. Her practice focuses on the remnants of the post-industrial era—twisted steel, shattered glass, and melted headlights. With delicate brushwork and philosophical reflection, she transforms these “discarded” materials into visual narratives charged with vitality and resistance.
Like an “explorer,” YAO wanders between the city and its edges, capturing through aimless drifting and unexpected encounters those anomalous events hidden in daily life. She takes the byproducts of the post-industrial era as her central creative thread, revisiting them repeatedly through sustained site-based practice. To her, these “remnants” are not static ruins but witnesses to the ongoing struggle between civilization and matter. They persist in a stance of resistance, poised between fragility and permanence, order and chaos.
In YAO’s work, industrial materials are not mere appendages of civilization but independent beings with their own subjectivity. Her work Expansion (2023) exemplifies this trajectory: on canvas she depicts steel abandoned by human hands, while extending beyond the picture plane into forms that reach outward, resisting total “discipline.” Scratches, bends, and corrosion are not flaws but the material’s own “affective declarations.” They refuse the tyranny of polished perfection, asserting vitality through their incompleteness.
YAO is fascinated by the destructive beauty revealed when order collapses into disorder, yet she also discerns within chaos the latent outlines of another kind of order. Her art is not only an image-based experiment with industrial remnants but also an allegory of contemporary existence. “What we call eternity is nothing more than decay not yet revealed; what we call order will ultimately find its resting place in the embrace of disorder.” In her layered compositions, where time and space intersect, viewers are invited to reconsider how repetition and difference reconstruct the logic of existence, and to re-experience the subtle resonance between the self and its destiny.