Yasmine Anlan Huang and Diyou Yu: Weighty is the Wood, Tender is the Night

Date and time

Sat, 2 Nov 2024 14:00 - 16:00 GMT

Location

Small Gallery 斯磨畫廊

12 Blakeney Close London N20 9LH United Kingdom

Show map

About this event

Event lasts 2 hours

As part of ‘London is Calling: Emerging Artist Initiative,’ Small Gallery is proud to present a two-person exhibition Weighty is the Wood, Tender is the Night 木與夜孰長.

What draws together Yasmine Anlan Huang and Diyou Yu is a deep fascination with time. Yasmine brings to this exhibition her lastest installation series Bad things happen, not only in literature (2024), where vintage, displaced objects re-emerge as a site where multiple layers of the past co-exist. In Yasmine’s single-channel video installation, Her Love is a Bleeding Tank, an eye becomes a theatre. Time, in a little girl’s theatre of life, finds a different kind of configuration. Light creeps into walnut wood in the blink of an eye. Time is folded into the pages of Diyou’s artist book While You Were Absent, Flowers Blossomed, a project that is all about waiting, a process wherein the apparitions of flower petals might even surprise their creator.

The exhibition opening includes the two artists’ guided tour within the gallery space. Please R.S.V.P. via Eventbrite if you want to attend the opening. Registration via Eventbrite is essential: https://bit.ly/3YbND8x

Schedules

Saturday, 2 November 2024

2:00 pm door opens

2:30 pm – 3:15 pm two artists’ guided tour

3:15 pm – 4:00 pm reception

About the Artists

Yasmine Anlan Huang (b. Guangzhou, China) is an artist and writer migrating from cities to cities. Diving into the complexities of ingénue or shōjo archetype across diverse cultures, her works dedicate to uncover hidden power structures and decolonize storytelling. She orchestrates a polyphony that blends past and future, fiction and reality, sublime and absurdity, innocence and violence. With a fusion of personal cosmology, classic literature, historical archives, youth subcultures, and everyday objects, she crafts emotive worlds through moving images, texts, performances, and installations, all serving as surrogates for her hyper-vulnerability — she is also interested in how digital spaces swallow up and regurgitate life experiences.

Huang’s works have been featured internationally, including Whitney Biennial 2024, Power Station of Art, Peckham24, HART Haus, Tabula Rasa Gallery, with solo or duo exhibitions at Floating Projects, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Seoul National University Woosuk Gallery and Goethe-Institut Hong Kong. She has been awarded residencies in Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Wassaic Project, Penland School of Craft, among others. Her writings and translations appeared in Heichi Magazine, p-articles, SAMPLE Mag, and many other platforms. Her debut book of poems and essays, Love of the Colonizer, has been published by Accent Sisters.
Huang received her BA (Hons) in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong, an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Hong Kong, and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.

https://www.yasminehuang.com/

Diyou Yu is an artist and printmaker based in London, UK, and Shaoxing, China. She has a training background in drawing, analogue darkroom printing and intaglio printing. She finished her MA Print program at Royal College of Art 2021 and is one of the recipients of Augustus Martin Award upon her graduation. She has exhibited in London and internationally. Participated exhibitions include Summer Exhibition 2022, RA, London; Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2021, 2022, 2023, London; 'Booked' International Hong Kong Book Fair 2021, 2023, 2024, Hong Kong; Artists as Independent Publishers 2021 at Weserburg Museum, Bremen.

Diyou's works have been responding to the impermanent fact of things. Blooming flowers, water, moon, clouds and ashes are motifs in her work, which symbolise the fact of change, and other signifiers have been collected to imply impermanence. The works themselves are also referring to the temporary standpoints of herself when she found the temporary solutions and composures among the inevitable changes. Analogue darkroom printing, etching, drawing, obsolete, relatively repetitive, and time-consuming methods are used to rewrite, translate, and then represent those replicas of temporary tranquil moments to audiences.

https://www.yudiyouchayachandra.net/

About the curator

Panpan Yang's academic, creative and curatorial work centres on the redefinition of spaces and the interplay between different media. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and is currently a lecturer (assistant professor) in the arts and visual cultures of modern China at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. From 2023 to 2025, she is the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project on calligraphic imagination in contemporary Chinese art and emergent media. She has collaborated with Diyou Yu on the artist book Handscroll (2024), recently exhibited at the 2024 Hong Kong Art Book Fair at Tai Kwun Contemporary.

https://www.yangpanpan.com/

About Small Gallery 斯磨畫廊

A 1920s semi-detached period house transformed into a gallery, Small Gallery is a not-for-project experimental art space in North London. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Small Gallery stands out in London's vibrant gallery scene for its close ties to top-tier art historians and museum curators, especially in the Asian art circle.

Small Gallery is named as such not only because it is literally small but also because 'small' sounds like sīmó 斯磨, meaning 'intimate' in Chinese. It represents a close working relationship, an alternative to the commercial model of mainstream galleries, and an effort to decolonise the contemporary practices of exhibition and display.

Small Gallery is only a three-minute walk from Totteridge & Whetstone Station.

Address: 12 Blakeney Close, London N20 9LH

Other than its events and openings, Small Gallery runs by appointment only.

https://www.smallgallerylondon.com/

About the Gallery Entrance

Please enter Small Gallery through its back garden, where you will encounter a site-specific installation composed of an array of stones - found, arranged and rearranged by world-renowned contemporary artists Qu Leilei and Caroline Deane. The textures of the stones strikingly resemble the letters in the English alphabet. Together, the stones spell out 's-M-A-l-l G-A-l-l-E-r-y.'

Acknowledgement

Small Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which generously funds the exhibition and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London for institutional support.