Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6Z 2H7
The Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to announce the release of two new Artist Editions by Yang Fudong and Ian Wallace. The Gallery’s Artist Editions program produces limited edition artworks by distinguished Canadian and international artists, which are offered for sale exclusively through the Gallery Store. Proceeds from the sale of Artist Editions are used to support Vancouver Art Gallery programs. Earlier Artist Editions include works by Gabriela Albergaria, Sonny Assu, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Scott McFarland, Kyohei Sakaguchi, Fiona Tan, and O Zhang.
The Fifth Night (2010) was created by Yang Fudong specifically for the Gallery in relation to his solo exhibition Yang Fudong: Fifth Night, which was on view at the Gallery from May 12 to September 3, 2012. Yang Fudong is a Shanghai-based artist who produces dramatic and highly stylized films and installations. In Fifth Night, a single scene has been filmed simultaneously from seven different vantage points to create an open-ended narrative. The film depicts a number of figures that wander and cross paths in a dark city square. This disjunctive narrative offers a sense of dislocation that is reflective of the new China as well as a rapidly changing contemporary society, and explores the tension between traditional ideologies/values and recent modernization. For his Artist Edition, Yang Fudong selected a single image from his seven-screen installation that captures some of the mysterious and poetic beauty of his film: a young woman in a floral dress gazes into the distance while a young man stands behind her, his gaze fixed on her. Yang Fudong graduated from the China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou, in 1995 and is one of the most significant and influential artists to emerge in China since the 1990s. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003, 2007); Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); Shanghai Biennale (2002); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2005) and Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2006.)
Contact Sheet for L’Après-Midi (1977/2012) was created by Canadian artist Ian Wallace specifically for the Gallery in relation to his major retrospective Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography, on view at the Gallery from October 27, 2012 to February 24, 2013. The Edition is a black-and-white silver gelatin contact print created from negatives Wallace shot in 1977 for the works Colours of the Afternoon, which is included in his current exhibition, and L’Après-Midi. The work is a series of images depicting a close-up of a woman’s face with her eyes closed and her hands pressed against her temples. The sequence features her hands as they move to cover her face and then focus on just her hands and arms as she washes them in the pebble-filled water. This gesture suggests a moment of revelation or enlightenment; the washing of her hands is a literal cleansing but also suggestive of purity, in keeping with the idea that the subject is experiencing a moment of transformation. During the 1970s, influenced by cinema and wishing to link photography to the discourses of contemporary art, Wallace experimented with sequential imagery. Wallace is an internationally renowned Vancouver-based artist known for his conceptual photo-based work, and he was among the first to use large-format photography in the 1970s, essentially equating photography with the scale of cinema, advertising and history painting. He has exhibited his work since 1965, including solo exhibitions at Vancouver Art Gallery (1988); Hamburg Kunstverein (1998); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008); Kunsthalle Zurich (2008); Mackenzie Gallery, Regina (2010); and the Power Plant, Toronto (2010.)
A full list of Artist Editions available from the Vancouver Art Gallery can be viewed on our website.
To make a purchase of a work in the Artist Edition series, or for more information, please call the Gallery Store at 604 662 4706 or email gallerystore [at] vanartgallery.bc.ca.
For more information, contact Carolyn Jack: cjack [at] vanartgallery.bc.ca / T 604 671 2358.