University of Waterloo Art Gallery

January 9 – March 8, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 9, 5-8 pm

Xiaojing Yan
Under the Pines, Over the Clouds

Under the Pines, Over the Clouds is rooted in Xiaojing Yan’s Chinese heritage and her experience as an immigrant. Her explorations as an artist can be viewed through a similarly bifurcated lens: the forms and landscapes are equally as indebted to the artist’s cultural identity as they are to her empathy for the natural world.

Yan chooses materials based on their symbolic potential: pearls, pine needles, or Lingzhi mushrooms for instance. She activates their latent potential by composing them into complex, often unexpected forms. For Spirit Cloud, the artist uses over 33,000 freshwater pearls to create a luminous oscillating matrix that simultaneously evokes a cumulus cloud or a mushroom. In Mountain of Pines, the hazy, mountainous forms from traditional Chinese landscape painting are achieved by weaving thousands of pine needles through sheets of translucent gauze. For the Lingzhi Girl series, mushroom spores are mixed with wood chips before being set in a mould. The cast is then exposed to humidity and light to spur the mycelium to grow transforming the bust into a one-of-a-kind hybrid portrait that combines nature, science and art.

This uneasy balance between culture and nature is the tension at the heart of Yan’s artwork. On the one hand, her work seems modelled on the ideal of the “mind landscape” espoused in traditional Chinese landscape painting, where the pictorial and personal merge towards Zen-like form. On the other, Yan upsets these traditional modes by inserting pearls, pine needles and spores into her hybrid creations. In this manner she cedes human autonomy to a less predictable natural process. Yan’s work explores the ways in which nature, over time, can transcend culture.

Xiaojing Yan is a China-born, Canadian artist who holds an MFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Nanjing University of the Arts. She is renowned for labour-intensive works that bridge cultures by intertwining Chinese customs with symbolic materials that forge connections between art, nature, and science. Her figurative sculptures made using mycelial cultures have gained the artist international exposure, and her artworks have been exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum, Chinese-American Arts Council in New York City, Suzhou Museum in China, and Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, among many other venues. Her work was recently featured on the cover of Art in America, and her paper Mythical Mushrooms: Hybrid Perspectives on Transcendental Matters appeared in Leonardo published by MIT Press. She lives and works in Markham, Ontario. Artist Website

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University of Waterloo Art Gallery
East Campus Hall, Room 1239
519.888.4567 ext. 33575
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Contact
Ivan Jurakic, Director/Curator
519.888.4567 ext. 46741
ijurakic@uwaterloo.ca

Hours
Wednesday to Saturday 12-5 pm
Or by appointment

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Ground floor entry
Automated doors available at west entrance to Fine Arts (ECH)
Wide pathways
Accessible washrooms on ground level

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263 Phillip Street, Waterloo
East Campus Hall (ECH) is located adjacent to Engineering 6 (E6)
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Visitor Parking available in B Lot (E6) or Q Lot (EC1) for a flat rate of $7
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Mailing
University of Waterloo Art Gallery
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1

Image credit: Xiaojing Yan, Lingzhi Girl No. 20 (detail), 2020, Mycelium, cultivated lingzhi mushrooms and wood chips. Photo courtesy of the artist. Description: Close-up view of a portrait bust of the artist covered in reddish-brown mushrooms.