杨歆奕：未完成乐园
Yang Xinyi: Wonderland That Never Ends
策展人 | Curator: 于非 | Yu Fei
艺术家 | Artist: 杨歆奕 | Yang Xinyi
开幕时间 | Opening: 2026.3.21
展览时间 | Exhibition Dates: 2026.3.21-2026.5.5
地点 | Venue: 蜂巢当代艺术中心 | Hive Center for Contemporary Art
地址｜Address: 北京市酒仙桥路4号798艺术区E06 | E06, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
Hive Contemporary Art Center is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition “Wonderland That Never Ends” by artist Yang Xinyi, opening on March 21, 2026, in Hive | Beijing Headquarters’ Exhibition Halls B and C. Following her 2024 solo exhibition “Sensory Sonnet” at Hive Becoming Shanghai Space, this new body of paintings collectively points toward an elusive, ever-evolving realm—a parallel universe that defies easy categorization, constantly generating and reconstructing itself. It mirrors both the inner self and the cosmos, bridging history and future, memory and fantasy, while witnessing infinite transformations and rebirths within the intertwined fabric of all things. Curated by Yu Fei, the exhibition runs through May 5, 2025.
Perhaps humanity’s most romantic and primordial shared imagination is that the world began with a cosmic egg.
While narratives of egg-based creation abound, what truly sparks the imagination is not how the world differentiated and expanded across diverse cultural contexts, but rather that ancient ancestors believed the boundless cosmos could reside within an oval no larger than the palm of a hand—that immeasurable suns, moons, stars, mountains, rivers, and heavens could be condensed within such disproportionate confines. Today, we remain captivated by the world’s unfathomable mysteries. The advancement and innovation of modern science have not diminished this fascination through the establishment of certainty; rather, it has become the most abundant nourishment, continuously fueling an ever-expanding realm of imagination.
Yang Xinyi’s creations undoubtedly resonate with this primal impulse. Within her pictorial universe, the scale of the world is determined by the measure of imagination. The eye of the weather deity is composed of galaxies; the tiny space within a clay pot conceals constellations of the Southern Hemisphere; particles invisible to the naked eye can construct a vibrant garden… When the human perspective is no longer the absolute reference point, the rigid boundaries between macro and micro begin to dissolve. The relative relationships between things undergo a profound transformation, and more material life continually emerges and resonates in unexpected ways. Every corner of the canvas holds untapped potential for further exploration. A seemingly insignificant detail in one area may well be a colossal entity in another distant world deep within the painting. Here, the vastness and intricacy of nested universes are laid bare.
Time itself is a form of distance. Yang Xinyi transforms painting into the very experience of time travel, capturing the shifting seasons and celestial cycles through fantastical journeys across the canvas. From meticulously rendering a sunrise on an unknown planet, to traversing celestial pathways woven through the Milky Way, to witnessing ancient citadels and futuristic metropolises coexisting—scene after scene unfolds as a carefully crafted time-lapse panorama by Yang Xinyi. The trajectories of things, infinitely layered, form a highly condensed essence of time. What is recorded on the canvas is not a single slice of a moment, but an unbroken continuum of every passing instant. Within this overflowing fantasy, the world we inhabit is both one and yet seems like countless others.
Painting is intensely visual, yet it transcends mere sight. It mobilizes the creator’s multiple senses, summoning an equally multifaceted sensory response from the viewer. For Yang Xinyi, at least, specific musical melodies often serve as triggers for bodily awareness, effortlessly extracting chaotic forms and hues from the subconscious. The ubiquitous greens and blues found throughout nature are diluted and harmonized, blending with more complex and varied patches of color to transform into the lush vegetation and azure seas and night skies within the paintings. The intricate entanglement of sight and sound causes the image to oscillate between concreteness and abstraction. The emotional currents triggered by multiple senses continually prompt improvisational shifts within the predetermined blueprint, making painting resemble a practice governed by the laws of the microscopic world—cycling between fluidity and materiality.
Yang Xinyi’s paintings unreservedly reveal her method of constructing worlds—wrapping rational order in unrestrained sensibility. Lines of varying lengths, embodying the smallest units of the material world, weave with deliberate density and sparseness across every corner of the canvas. Whether depicting architecture or flora, star clusters or beams of light, these forms intertwine and overlap within an almost constant rhythmic pulse of lines, emanating an aura of vitality. Often radiating outward like ripples from an elusive center in the void, the lines trace both inward and outward within a visually magnetic vortex, perpetually probing the unknown origins and future of cosmic life.
“The world existed before humanity and will continue to exist after humanity. Humanity is merely an opportunity the world possesses to organize some information about itself”. [Italo Calvino, Cosmic Tales, Yilin Press, 2012.] Calvino never placed humanity at the center of the world, yet this did not diminish his fervent passion for enriching the cosmos through human imagination. Similarly, though human figures never appear in Yang Xinyi’s paintings, traces of humanity—as the medium through which we perceive the world and interact with all things—permeate his work. Human life is indeed small and fleeting, yet perhaps we are not merely passive participants in the cosmic evolution of life. As Yang Xinyi’s paintings suggest, within an open world devoid of absolute objectivity, we nonlinearly explore and construct our own unfinished paradise.
2 Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics,Yilin Press, 2012.
