About

Ruohan Yang’s Exhibition ‘Flowers of Evil’ 2021

Ruohan Yang’s ‘Flowers of Evil’ exhibits her 21 artworks which described the dark-side and bright-side of a human all the time. It used to be a struggle, but both sides have turned to understand each other more by time. Her work also reveals that in a very civilized city, people become more complex on hiding their emotions behind the hypocrisy. The non-reasons can’t find their place in this modern society.

Artist Statement ©Ruohan:

‘The <Flowers of Evil> exhibition is a search for the depths of the soul. In oil paintings, the dark and bright sides of people are depicted, and they are poured into her artworks. Once the two sides always conflicted with each other, but they gradually merged with each other over time. I want to show a civilized, exquisite and orderly world in my paintings. People are constantly using hypocrisy as masks to hide their own emotions. Irrationality is slowly disappearing in this world.

In modern society, human nature has become more and more complex. The transition between rationality and irrationality requires constant suppression of one’s inner emotions in the appearance of civilization. Irrational can no longer find its place. In the field of people’s private lives, intimacy continues to breed darkness and harm. I use the process of human growth to explain how people’s inner nature and impulse are reflected in a child’s perspective. Purity is extreme, but it will suddenly become its opposite, because the soul is easily distorted and seduced by malice.

In the oil painting ‘Pain, Love and Salvation’, the girl cried because of the broken porcelain doll and her psychological pains were ignored by her mother. In the oil painting ‘The Devil in the House’, borrowing the metaphor of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, it is revealed that the truly dark side is not from the monster that appears in the house, but the woman who drove it away.’

Exhibition Introduction ©Jier Art:

Every time the transformation in economy, politics, and technology will trigger people’s thinking about their own situation. Since the 19th century, the development of capitalism and materialism has destroyed the traditional rationalism and its value system. The American psychologist Rollo May in <Man’s Search for Himself> stated that ‘Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, proclaimed that science in the late nineteenth century was becoming a factory, and he feared that man’s great advances in techniques without a parallel advance in ethics and self-understanding would lead to nihilism.’ The rationalism was established by mankind would eventually disintegrate with nothingness. Bertolt Brecht’s <Mother Courage and her children>, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s <The Great Gatsby>, Eugene O’Neill’s <The Hairy Ape>, Eugene Ionesco’s <The New Tenant>, as metaphors in their dramas that: the development of materialism gradually weakened people’s sense of belonging, and the self-worth and meaning of human beings lose the scale of judgment. In the 19 century, Friedrich Nietzsche declared, ‘God is dead’. The historical value system collapsed, but the new value system has not yet formed during the time. Without the constraints of the value system, the 20th century fell into irrationality.

The Absurdist playwrights Samuel Beckett in his <Waiting for Godot> said that waiting for ‘Godot’, expressing the expectation of a new ‘God’ and also the expectation of a new rationality. Since the 21st century, the 20th century art rooted in the irrationalism has gradually disappeared. Ruohan Yang is keen on intuitive observation and perceives this change. She believes that rationality and irrationality merged after conflicting with each other, but irrationality did not completely disappear, but was hidden behind the new mask of rationality.

<The Flower of Evil> is named after the French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s <Les Fleurs du mal>. His poem inherits the social values of 19th century and the 20th century. It was explained in France that ‘The great tradition has disappeared, and the new tradition has not yet formed.’ This poem seemed to be a strange bunch of flowers bloomed during the transformation period. At the beginning of the 21st century, Ruohan Yang brings <Flowers of Evil> as the theme of the exhibition, as if to remind us, that have we really stepped out of the irrationality of the 20th century and entered into an era of rationality?

Group Exhibitions:

2019: Borderland, the train to macondo (collected by NUA museum), The second Jiangsu Province Youth Art Exhibition, Jiangsu Provincial Art Gallery, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

2017: Initial life, photography, vivid project/digital festival, Birmingham, UK.