Vitamin Creative Space

Biography

Shao Fan, Hao (art name): Yu Han. Shao Fan was born in 1964 to a renowned family of artists in Beijing, where he has lived ever since. He studied painting with his mother and father from a young age.

For the past forty years, his artistic practice has covered and spanned various mediums including ink on rice paper, oil on canvas, sculpture, garden design and architecture. In recent years, through the process of repetitive work, Shao Fan experiences the slowing of time, to the point that one achieves the mental state of a jade-polishing artisan from the Liangzhu culture. Shao Fan truly embodies this state in his painting process: a state that allows him to profoundly contemplate the relationships between form and line, between ink and color. In his recent works, this temporal volume and topography is expressed in further indescribable forms. The artist commits himself to the guidance of uncontrollable forces, and we follow him along this winding path to secluded places, probing the possibilities of alternate dimensions. In this way, the artwork itself becomes the site of ineffable phenomena.

These creations of Shao Fan’s might be seen as “sites of communal contemplation” to which each individual can bring the perspective of their own lived experience. Unlike specific, historical places, these sites hold a void at their center, a measure of distance, an instant of original perception, that invites each visitor to pause, recalling the statement of the artist: “I liken art to a pearl or to Agar incense wood: both are in essence reactions of an organism to injury.”