Michael Janssen Berlin

ARTISTS

For Asia Now 2022 Michael Janssen Berlin will present works by two emerging painters, Iabadiou Piko and Yafeng Duan.

Yafeng Duan constructs her paintings from color surfaces, layering them in semi-transparent layers in such a way that boundaries are sometimes accentuated and sometimes merge into one another. The surfaces, in turn, receive their tension and mentality through individual material differences in texture; they can be jagged like mountains, hilly like a gentle landscape, or smooth like the surface of a lake when the wind is still. Duan‘s observations of nature become an abstract play of associations on the canvas as stored experiences and perceptions. Duan originally trained in traditional Chinese painting, experiments with impressionist legacy by mixing different painting media and blending the eastern and western approach.

A self - taught Indonesian painter Iabadiou Piko is heavily inspired by his surrounding environment - expressing and translating reality into paintings using a rich visual language. “My work is an expression and the memory of behavior and personal feeling of anxiety about the perception of material reality, fantasy and human transformation. It is inspired by doodles, lines, images, impressions of forms, shapes, colors and environments that I have seen.” 20th century Western painting history with artists ranging from Picasso, Basquiat, Dubuffet and Twombly are important references in Piko’s vivid and constantly evolving oeuvre.