GENTLY SAVAGE. 2020-2022

Gently Savage (2022) responds to the writings of French psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, referencing her posthumous text Power of Gentleness where she praises the risks of living with, in, and through gentleness. “It is not always sweet [doux] to live. But the sensation of being alive calls upon gentleness.” She reminds us, “Gentleness is what turns traumatic intrusion into creation. It is what, during the haunted night, offers light; during mourning, a beloved face; during the collapse of exile, the promise of a shore on which to stand.” At the same time, there is an anguished form of deadly gentleness, where melancholia knots the body and gentleness consents to this complete disconnection, self-oblivion. It is here that Yanyun Chen draws from conflict in a gentle savagery, staging and twisting her floral motifs, object-nostalgia, and classical technique into a performance of melancholia. Living is risking, and the gently savage tumbles with the savaged gentleness. Such is living today.

Anne Dufourmantelle died on July 21, 2017 while trying to rescue two children caught in the Mediterranean when the water became dangerously turbulent. The children were rescued by lifeguards and survived, but Dufourmantelle could not be resuscitated. She was Yanyun’s teacher at the European Graduate School in 2012. Under the invitation of Intersections Gallery, headed by Art Historian Marie-Pierre Mol, artist Yanyun Chen will be producing a solo exhibition entitled “Gently Savage” for the Asia Now Paris Asian Art Fair 2021, part of the Paris Art Week 2021 programmes at 9 av. Hoche, 8e, Paris, France. These works respond to the writings of French psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, referencing her posthumous text “Power of Gentleness” where she praises the risks of living with, in, and through gentleness. “It is not always sweet [doux] to live. But the sensation of being alive calls upon gentleness.” She reminds us, “Gentleness is what turns traumatic intrusion into creation. It is what, during the haunted night, offers light; during mourning, a beloved face; during the collapse of exile, the promise of a shore on which to stand.” At the same time, there is an anguished form of “deadly gentleness”, where melancholia knots the body and gentleness consents to this complete disconnection, self-oblivion. It is here that Yanyun Chen draws from conflict in a gentle savagery, staging and twisting her floral motifs, object-nostalgia, and classical technique into a performance of melancholia. Living is risking, and the gently savage tumbles with the savaged gentleness. Such is living today. 

Essay by Marie-Pierre Mol
Art historian and co-founder Intersections Gallery

Whilst people are often striken by collective amnesia and modern men strive to remove from their field of view all that suggest their fragility, memory and transience have always been the areas of predilection for artists and philosophers. Since the Dance Macabre and Memento Mori in the Middle Ages and the Vanitas paintings in the 16th and 17th century, artworks have never ceased to remind us that wealth does not provide immortality to its owner. Besides the usual symbols destined to represent the passage of time and our mortal condition, skeletons, skulls, still-life, watches and hourglasses it is interesting to notice that books and scientific tools are sometimes depicted in Vanitas like in the famous painting by Holbein, The Ambassadors (1533). As heralds of today’s globalisation, the ambassadors have paced the world up and down, hoarded knowledge and wealth but the anamorphosis in the first ground, which represents a skull, reminds us of their mortal condition, our mortal condition. The Singaporean artist Yanyun Chen never stops highlighting in her artworks what we usually try to conceal, be it some scars or some fears. Gently Savage, her new series, is a continuation of this endeavour.

Yanyun creates artworks which echo her personal history like in the series entitled The Scars that Write Us, exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum in 2018, and of her identity as a Chinese woman in Stories of a Woman and her Dowry in 2019, but also literary or philosophical texts. Moreover, her work subtly combines Chinese aesthetics and mythologies to Western ones. In 2016, the Chasing Flowers series, inspired by a classic novel of 18th century Chinese literature, Dreams of the Red Chamber and the depiction of the devastation of a whole family, intended to represent the vanity of material values, which is a central theme of buddhist and taoist philosophies. For this series, Yanyun explains her intention to renew the tradition of the still-life genre by using charcoal and black and white and adds to be with, in death, is perhaps the only way to remember that we are always, already, dying. Yanyun has explored this theme on various materials, paper, fabric or metal in response to literary or musical works such as On Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham and Johannes Brahms’ Horn Trio op.40. In the latter case, the four fabric panels created by Yanyun express with brio not only the movement and the energy of the musical composition but also the emotion it conveys. In this series Yanyun employs Chinese painting’s aesthetics to reflect with both gentleness and savagery how man lives with nature, fights against nature, is consumed by nature.

Yanyun decided to pay tribute to the French psychonalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmentelle who was her professor at The European Graduate School in Switzerland, where she received her Ph.D. under the Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory division. In 2011 Anne Dufourmentelle published a book titled In Praise of Risk in which she explored what can be the meaning of to take the risk of being completely alive in an era which values safety more than anything else. Anne Dufourmentelle passed away on 21st July 2017, at 53, while trying to rescue two children from drowning in the Mediterranean sea.

Gently Savage responds to another book by Anne Dufourmentelle titled Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living. In this book the risk is the risk taken when choosing gentleness as a behaviour rule. Indeed, it is not always sweet [doux] to live. But the sensation of being alive calls upon gentleness. Moreover, quoting again Anne Dufourmentelle, Gentleness is what turns traumatic intrusion into creation. It is what during the haunted night, offers light; during mourning, a beloved face; during the collapse of exile, the promise of a shore on which to stand. But gentleness can also be mortal when it becomes a melancholia synonymous with self forgetfulness.

Imagined before the explosion of the pandemic, this series now appears premonitory.

Being conceived during a time of world wide trauma, the entry point chosen by Yanyun makes her new series a hot topic. Her usual floral motives reflect the current melancholia, made of gentleness, the gentleness to accept the most terrible: mourning for instance and made of savagery, the savagery of anguish, anguish which cannot be tamed. This series echoes another statement by Anne Dufourmentelle: anguish is a death threat at a time when we should accept to be mortal and thus to be light.

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Our friends at Intersections Gallery had planned to show an earlier version of Yanyun Chen’s Gently Savage at the Asia Now Paris Asian Art Fair 2020. The artist and Art Porters thank Marie-Pierre Mol for her writing contribution.