Limited Art Project–Rockbund

Yan Lei

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Dimensions Variable

2012

Yan Lei has created a high-ceilinged white-box space on the fourth and fifth floors of the museum, the first time such a re-modelling has been attempted in the Royal Asiatic Society building. Limited Art Project–Rockbund on display here is a continuation of Yan’s earlier similarly titled piece shown in Kassel.    

Yan Lei had over 400 paintings sent to Kassel, the works filling the entire exhibition space. During the hundred days the piece Limited Art Project was on show, the artist would take some of these paintings to a nearby Volkswagen factory to be spray-painted, the original picture now turned into a single block of colour which Yan would then take back to the exhibition space and rehang in its original position. Only the writing on the back of the canvas remained to identify the original work, and these would be plain objective descriptions of the content of the picture — ‘Maggie Cheung with permed hair’, ‘Trees in Shenzhen’, ‘Corner Tower at the Forbidden City’, ‘Botticelli’s Venus’ and so forth. As this process continued, the pictorial images continued to steadily disappear, the works of art no longer extant, and only a space and its walls filled with blocks of colour.