Ann Yan – The Kitchen Is A Place, SxS Gallery

The Kitchen Is A Place is a solo exhibition by artist Ann Yan (闫安), held at SxS Gallery, Shanghai. The exhibition was curated by Zhang Yehong (张业鸿). Graphic design by Xiaoyuan Gao, using Elliott’s Blue Eyeshadow and Yink for headlines; the secondary type is a combination of Metallophile Sp8, Resource Han Rounded and the ornaments found in Looking Flowers Deco. Latin alphabet elements in the body copy are set in NotCourierSans.

From SxS Gallery (auto-translated from the Chinese):

For artist Ann Yan, growing up near the Freud Museum in North West London inspired her interest in psychoanalysis and the human mind, especially the subconscious mind, which is deeply embedded in the universal human experience. As a second-generation immigrant, Ann Yan has consciously looked back and tapped into her own cultural collective memory. Citing images from numerous 80s cookbooks, she focuses on recipes that are full of East Asian flavor and flips this nostalgia into a personal and surreal narrative style.

If Dali’s grotesque imagery in Carla’s Dinner Party is to be seen as opening a new path for the tradition of table still life painting, Ann Yan has undoubtedly inherited this aesthetic, combining imagery and depictions of food with her own reflections on post-colonialism and cultural relativism through the combined mediums of oil paintings, sculpture, and collage.