YIN Zi’ang: Hold Back the Dawn: Curated by GAO Yutao
“When thou lookest on the stars, my star, oh! would I were the heavens and could see thee with a thousand eyes.” —— As cited by Hegel in Lectures on Aesthetics, Vol. III, attributed to Plato’s cry to Argus, the Hundred-Eyed Giant
BONIAN SPACE is pleased to present the solo exhibition Hold Back the Dawn by artist YIN Zi'ang, featuring his latest paintings. The exhibition will last from November 8 to December 21, 2025. The exhibition is curated by GAO Yutao.
YIN Zi’ang once said, “I want both the Dionysian frenzy and the Apollonian clarity.” Frenzy is not chaos, but the surging vitality of life; clarity is the luminous transparency that art demands from the depths of the soul. These two desires find a strange harmony in the brevity of night. In the dark, the artist does not struggle or resist; he surrenders to the descent, sinking deeper into blackness, because it is there he finds what he seeks: the astonishing, the terrifying, the sticky, and the paradoxically beautiful. For him, what is essential about beauty does not reside in its dazzling moments of brilliance, but in those fleeting glimpses of what might have been lost in memory.
In the hush of night, where shadows shimmer and light drifts, YIN Zi’ang’s brushwork shifts between the gentleness of a breath — tracing the quiver of light — and the turbulence of a torrent — building layers like strata of rock. Viewed up close, one feels the texture of touch and light; from afar, forests, beasts, insects, limbs, the moon, and constellations emerge. His visual language hovers between abstraction and figuration, reflecting the nature of night itself — expansive yet dissolving, sheltering yet restless. The revelations that arise from his night are never acts of escape; rather, they are fertile chaos: desire rising and collapsing, memory breaking apart and reassembling. They merge into “a colored whirlpool of life,” collapsing at last into a black hole — miraculously shortening the distance between one inner universe and another.
The artist believes that true painting should act directly upon the viewer’s bodily senses, not through intellectual comprehension. To observe inwardly one’s own reactions to an image is an indispensable step in creation: when the brush touches the canvas, does the vision seen and the tactile subtlety felt — the entire body even shake under some unknown force? If yes, he follows it to the end. If not, he abandons it. This honesty with the inner response makes his painting a kind of ontogenetic practice — the image is not pre-designed, but slowly emerges through continual probing and adjustment. This process resembles the act of fishing, which the artist deeply adores. Under moonlight, on the lake of the subconscious and the conscious, he casts his line — the brush — using color as bait, seeking through each rhythmic motion that ancient tryst: painting as his counterpart, as an eternal language — to be sensed, to be awaited.
“Hold back the dawn,” he murmurs while painting deep into the night — the phrase stirs something ancient — buried, but not gone. They speak of the beginning of life, when we were all born from the same primordial darkness, wrapped in a viscous membrane, encrusted with remnants of stardust. Still, we linger — suspended between heaven and earth. As the Italian saying goes, Per l'amaro e il dolce — “for the bitter as well as the sweet.” Cherish every tremor of the night, and feel, with an upturned gaze, the stirring of distant stars — and the first, unseen pulse of the unknown.
