Name Li Yan | Role Artist | |
Li Yan is an oil painting artist, born in Jilin, China in 1977, who lives and works in Beijing, China.
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Accident Series
Li Yan put on a series of paintings called his Accident Series at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The actual names of the acrylic paintings were Accident No. 5 and Accident No. 6. "Approaching painting as a forensic activity, Li's works are comprised of groups of small canvases to reconstruct disaster scenes as elaborate narratives."
The main point of Li Yan’s accident series is to show the microcosmic power of violence in an individual setting. When disaster is portrayed as a whole, Li Yan feels that much of what actually happens is lost to the viewer. For instance, when a news helicopter flies over a burnt down area of a town, the whole picture of the town just looks chaotic, and the viewer only gets a sense of a town burning down. When Li Yan takes a giant disaster, and paints individual parts of the disaster, he feels the actually expression of disaster is portrayed in a better way to the viewer.
Yan will paint something as large as the giant disaster itself, but then also something as small as a room where things have been pushed to the floor. With the combination of these elements, the viewer can almost put themselves in the shoes of someone who is at the actual scene.