Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong presents Gold. Circle. Tiger, a solo exhibition of new works by Chinese artist Ye Linghan. While this will be the third time Ye Linghan is exhibited at the gallery, this will be the first time the artist’s work takes over the entire gallery space, including the main exhibition room and the Project Room.

This ambitious, multi-media installation will include three new video works: Rotation and Chrysler (2013), After the Spelling of the Names of God (2013), and Gold. Circle. Tiger (2014), as well as works on paper and paintings related to the videos. Ye’s videos are an amalgamation of his drawings, paintings, and fascination with digital animation, resulting in surreal, seemingly three-dimensional loops that focus on both the reduction and building up of various forms that interest him—in this case New York City’s Chrysler building, an imagined gold coin, and a chained tiger. In each video the disparate and highly symbolic imagery hover and rotate over a black background, creating a hypnotic effect and beckoning a contemplative study of the artist’s fastidious working method. The lack of narrative in Ye’s videos shifts the focus to the temporal quality of his hand-drawn animations; the artist feels that his videos allow him to manipulate and “create” time. While the artist is typically elusive about his choice of imagery and their context, he elucidates on the video Gold. Circle. Tiger (2014), the namesake of the exhibition:

‘This animation further explores the clues held in 99 Gods, another installation I created in 2013. It represents the idea of “fetters” and the many inexorable forces in our world. The camera constantly switches between images of a circle, a tiger and a shuttling object. Together with the circle moving non-stop within the confines of a square, the tiger, which is dangling upside down by a golden chain from which it is desperately trying to break free, is caught in a predicament that depicts our helplessness in the face of life’s constraints and represents a loud cry for a new world and freedom. The plunging object moves so fast that it suggests the inescapable force of gravity, which in turn transforms the object out of all recognition into what seems to be a massive, temporal black hole. Patches of gold appear repeatedly in the composition, generating yet more visual stimuli.’

-Ben Brown Fine Arts

Image: © Ye Linghan
Courtesy of the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts