MANGROVEGALLERY 红树林画廊

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Hou YijieCompass Pointing to the Secret Treasure
2024.7.27-9.7
MANGROVEGALLERY

MANGROVEGALLERY is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Hou Yijie, Compass Pointing to the Secret Treasure. This is Hou’s first gallery solo exhibition which will be showcasing his latest mixed media paintings. The exhibition will be on view from July 27th to September 7th 2024.

During an adventure, referring to nature and toolkits would undoubtedly be effective ways of navigation: celestial light serves as a soporific for fatalists, and the compass needle acts as reassurance for travellers. Born in 1996 in Sichuan, the artist Hou Yijie grew up influenced by the subcultures of Y2K, the early products of global trade and the rapid expansion of the internet. Anime, classic literature, myths, and pop songs seemingly appeared and vanished without a pattern. Yet, the traces left by these fleeting emotional stimuli help piece together a contradictory image of this generation—fearless yet fragile, diverse yet confused.

In this exhibition, Hou shows three diptychs at vital positions: “When the Sky Falls, it’s a Trivial Matter 1” “Compass Pointing to the Secret Treasure” and “Take Me to the New World”. The titles alone reveal the artist’s core concepts: passive resistance, reverse exploration, and a profound longing for transformation (especially for the better). As these large, screen-like canvases envelop the audience, the life-sized figures naturally enhance the sense of immersion. Their assertive postures, the environments they inhabit, the scattered objects around them, and the most striking visual “key clues”—red lava spewing like rain from a distant dormant volcano, yet the diverse people on the ground seem undisturbed; long-tailed meteors streak across the sky like lightning, while each member of the treasure-seeking team appears to have their own “survival tool”; the chaotic, repetitive lines not only highlight the sense of movement and uncertainty of this arduous journey, but also cast the current narrative scene into a swinging, hazy abstraction—all point towards romantic and hypothetical thinking.