Artist/designer Ying Yefu (design name KODYO), original name Ren Qianyi, (and apparently having just recently changed his name yet again, but as of yet has not informed the gallery of this new moniker!!) is presently in Xi’an, honing his painting skills. Trained as a graphic designer, he usually designs on a computer, a skill evident in his silkscreen works seen here on the ART LABOR Gallery website. ART LABOR Gallery will be releasing these impressive new works in the Spring of 2009.
Born in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province, China in 1983, he started with a passion for painting in his early childhood. He persists in this passion using aspects of memories, creating thoughtful independent design based artworks from a very personal and unique angle.
His uber-creative Kodyo Design artworks comprise 2-D posters and prints, T-shirt design, sculpture, installation, re-worked Chinese folk art, and personal design research. In the artist’s choice of his “artistic name”, Ying (meaning “newborn infant”) represents youth and tenderness, Ye (meaning “wild” or “savage”) stands as a symbol of the creative spirit, the hungry chase to produce imagination. Fu stands for the “gift” he offers to the public with each new creation.
An artist positively brimming with massive potential, ART LABOR Gallery provided Ying Ye fu with a platform for his first solo show in summer 2008, FESTIVAL OF RESTRAINTS, and his first series of handmade silkscreen prints from this show are being collected at a very brisk pace. His functional art and clothing is also being featured in the SHANGHAI MOCA shop in People’s Square and is also being featured in December’s edition of ELLE magazine.
To enter into the world of Ying Yefu is to return deep into a severe Chinese childhood, where the braids of a long lost mother restrain the reaching limbs of an inquisitive child. Traditional medical treatments of childhood illnesses resulting in gua shua bruises and forced vomiting, or being poked full of acupuncture needles and marked by cupping, rough wooden splints correcting the natural childhood impulse to flexibility and play. On one level his works appear innocent and simple, with tribute paid to the animation that informs so much of the “Gelatin Generation” (as artists born in the 1980’s were termed by art critic Zhang Qing) artists’ works, but on another level, there is a deeper, angrier subtext evident, which carries his work to a higher level of art than his simple and spoiled “fellow Jellies”, most of whom make obvious art that reflects their easy and pampered lives. Ying Yefu is sure to continue to stand out from his contemporaries as an original, provocative artist in a sea of mediocrity.
