Rising Tide 01

YUAN FANG (B. 1996)

Rising Tide 01

signed and dated 'Yuan Fang 2023' (on the reverse)

acrylic and oil stick on canvas

87 x 67 inches (221 x 170.2 cm)

Painted in 2023.

PROVENANCE:

Half Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2023

NOTES:

Born in 1996 in Shenzhen China, Yuan Fang is a painter who lives and works in New York. She graduated from the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts, where she received the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement. Fang has developed a distinct abstract language defined by layered textures, gestural brushwork, and shifting fields of color. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at Skarstedt, London; Prince & Wooster, New York; Bill Brady Gallery, Los Angeles; and more. She was selected for Forbes Asia 30 under 30 and became the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Long Museum, presenting her show Flux. Fang’s paintings are held in notable public collections.

Fang’s practice reflects a personal negotiation between movement and stillness, immediacy and reflection. Informed by her experiences of urban life in Shenzhen and New York, her compositions embody both physical speed and psychological depth. Working primarily in acrylic, she embraces the medium’s quick-drying nature, allowing intuition and decisiveness to guide her process. Layers of paint accumulate into dense, tactile surfaces that trace the gestures of the artist’s hand while suggesting an inner landscape of emotion and memory. Her work resists overt narrative, instead translating the sensations of dislocation, adaptation, and resilience into pure form and color.

Painted in 2023, Rising Tide 01 exemplifies this dynamic equilibrium. The canvas is rendered in a palette of deep blues, blacks, whites, and reddish browns, its surface animated by swirling, interlaced strokes that appear both spontaneous and carefully constructed. The energy of the brushwork recalls the gestural vigor of Abstract Expressionism—artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, whom Fang cites as formative influences—yet the composition remains distinctly her own. The result is a painting that feels at once kinetic and contemplative, where layered motion becomes a metaphor for persistence and renewal.