Yuan Fang

Skarstedt Chelsea is pleased to present Spaying, Yuan Fang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this deeply personal and formally rigorous body of work, Fang turns inward, offering a meditation on illness, identity, and the intricate architecture of womanhood. In addition to her large-scale canvases, Fang debuts a suite of smaller, more intimate paintings—what the artist refers to as “subplots,” fragments of a larger, lived narrative.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the medical and emotional ramifications of Fang’s recent breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments, functioning as a reference not only to the potential biological consequences of her treatment, but also the literal act of cutting—a gesture central to her process. Through cycles of modification, layering, and erasure, Fang pares down each composition until a dominant “entity” emerges. These central forms, always abstract yet bodily, function as torsos, anchoring each painting with a visceral sense of presence. “I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Fang notes, and indeed, each image carries that charge, meeting the viewer with both the emotional weight of her experience and a visual strength that builds like a storm on the horizon.

New to this body of work is Fang’s embrace of negative space. Informed by the tradition of “leaving blank” in Chinese painting, these compositional voids focus the viewer’s attention on what remains. Separately, the rhythm of her studio practice has slowed, inviting longer periods of contemplation and greater attention to detail. The resulting compositions feel more deliberate with each painting charged with quiet intensity.

Autobiographical threads run throughout. Several works incorporate the artist’s own medical imaging subtly embedded in the compositions, such as Accumulating, Breaking Through the Defense line. Others channel the psychic toll of external expectation and all of the rage, pressure, and fatigue that accompany it.

Throughout the show, Fang navigates the porous boundaries between vulnerability and strength, life and death. This emotional duality is echoed in the palette of deep burgundies, forest greens, and indigos, and in the evocative titles of works such as Standing, Injured Horse and Bloody Meteorite Falling from the Sky. In the ease of her oil transitions and the fluidity of her lines, there is a quiet but profound sense of release. The works in Spaying may emerge from pain, but they insist on clarity. Though anchored in personal experience, Spaying broadens Fang’s ongoing investigation into the construction of feminine identity and the quiet rebellions required to reclaim it. Confronting her own mortality has yielded a new lucidity, and with it, a sharpened resolve to live on her own terms.