In Zhang Yanna’s world of paintings, everyday life – even the overlapping steep peaks - is defined as unreachable purity and tranquillity. She tailors life into fragments, and re-braids them as a series of intermittently expanding windows of living beings. What motivates the artist to paint lurk in the blank areas of the exhibition space’s walls, and such viewings without “subjects” take us back to the realistic sights filled with depressions and anxieties – this is exactly the absent cause in Zhang Yanna’s paintings.

Zhang Yanna was born in Qingdao in 1975. She graduated from Oil Painting Department of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. She is now based in Beijing.

Image: © Zhang Yanna, White Space Beijing