SAO PAULO.- Galeria Jaqueline Martins is presenting Opfer, by Yan Xing. This is the Chinese artist’s first solo exhibition in South America. It is on view from August 25th through October 13th, 2018.

Opfer (“Sacrifice”—the title is a bow to Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film) presents an artist who is edgy, conceptual and provocative. Yan Xing has been receiving international acclaim over the past years. His multi-component, highly integrated interdisciplinary projects combine diverse media such as performance, video, photography, installation and painting. His body of work is being built through intense research that seeks to reflect critically on how narratives are manufactured in art, literature, history, and critical theory. Sharp in its presentation, his work is charged with a daunting primitive edge of aggression, intimating that far darker and crueler realities lie beneath the surface.

This exhibition consists of two large and conceptually interrelated installations through which Yan Xing explores themes such as negativity, destruction, resistance, damage, and order, as well as their complex interrelations. The artist develops a dialogue with avantgarde conceptual practices, the nouveau roman, actionism, New French Extremity, and Structural Film. He is transforming the gallery’s ground level into an environment reflecting glimpses of a hidden narrative of sacrifice and mercy, resulting from preceding performative actions. This sinister atmosphere is sustained on the second floor, where a video installation is showing a film captured by the artist in São Paulo that zeroes in on the city’s violent and ferocious nature.

Yan Xing (Chongqing, 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009. His work has been shown around the world, e.g. at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. His works are in the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong; and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris/San Francisco, and others. In 2012 Yan Xing won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Young Artist; that year, he also received a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize from the Pinchuk Art Centre. In June 2017, Kunsthalle Basel hosted Yan Xing: Dangerous Afternoon, his first major solo exhibition in Europe.