Yeast is a kind of bacterium that causes a foaming action, and is widely used in agriculture, medicine, brewage, food and chemical productions. It is a kind of catalyzer which triggers under certain circumstances life forms to undergo constant chemical reactions and biological transformations: inherent genetic information is disassembled and composed so that energy can be obtained to continue the process of life. The ultimate product of leavening is a substance that is produced to adjust metabolism and balance life form, in or at the end of the reaction processes. The choice of “Yeast” as the title of the exhibition stems from exploration of and reflections on contemporary art production, art presentation and breakthroughs in personal experiences.
 
Art creation is a transformative process that turns an idea into imagery. The idea or the plan is the combination of facts, experiences and knowledge. The artistic production is often a quest for transcendent breakthroughs, a quest for change. Artists cannot possibly grow with ideas only and unique experiences are an invaluable asset in the production of art. Yeast is interpreted in this exhibition as a catalyst that breaks through artistic expressions and personal experiences, and is endowed with the hope that it heightens the decomposition and composition process, and creates a novel artistic experience.
 
Among the participating artists, Chen Tianshuo uses the magnificent historical events as a carrier and, through the ingenious appropriation and reassembly of religious symbols, overlays existent historical images, resulting in a scene of “contemporary religion”, which corroborates and ridicules the absence of harmony in contemporary market-oriented society. Timeliness is a vivid feature of Dong Dawei’s works; both the 500 pieces of “Lonely Trees” and the natural images piled up by powders demonstrate the attention the artist gives to values derived from experience. Subjective emotional controls have been exempted in his works as they present the audience with a lingual context with multiple meanings that is open to viewer discretion. Imbued with religious significance, Xu Xiaohan’s natural seed carvings generate a sense of infinity, based on the idea that life changes and nothing lasts. Using ink cartoons as a means of free movement of paintings, Xu Zhiyang seeks to dispel bewilderment and to be free at will. Adept at painting, Xu ultimately uses every painting as the starting point and through collocation enables the paintings to flow. He thus breaks the traditional viewing angle, extends the original painting concepts and presents multiple or entirely different imageries. Yu Aijun pioneers a shoving technique of painting: dividing a picture into many units, he covers them up so that sections would not interfere with each other, and draws by focusing on the pigment in each unit. The artist makes use of another kind of experience so as to achieve the same result as with traditional experience, hoping to find new lingual logic in the process. Zhu Xinyu builds a dissected space with infinite sections in which information is divided up. Different people are asked to read and narrate the space and this process is recorded and presented in the space. Fragmented information leads to different experience, which is quite like “The blind men and an elephant” story, where uncertain emotional entanglements are woven into the space. 

Art has an extremely important part to play in the world today. As globalization deepens and the world becomes one, art has long crossed the regional and individual barriers, and its functionality, creativity and values have been continuously extended and widened. It has become a mission of contemporary artistic production how we cope with this volatile world and find some kind of correlation. In this exhibition, artists give some new thinking to existent artistic concepts and expressions, and present more ways of artistic creation --- that is what we mean by “Yeast”.