Ren Yao

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

My practice begins with a question: what remains of history when the narratives that once gave it coherence are no longer fully believed? Growing up in China, I encountered history as much through images as through written accounts. Buddhist guardians, political portraits, military uniforms, monuments and photographs formed a visual language through which authority, belief and the past became tangible. Although many referred to histories I had not experienced, they shaped how I learned to imagine them. Political structures change and collective ideals lose certainty, yet these images continue to circulate with unstable meanings. Working through painting, printmaking and spatial installation, I neither reconstruct these inherited forms nor simply reject them. I displace religious and political images from the settings that once organised their meanings, bringing them into new and contradictory relationships. Scale, juxtaposition and spatial staging become methods for examining how images position viewers in relation to authority and history. In Tianxia, a 7.4-metre-wide painting based on the Four Heavenly Kings, Buddhist guardians leave the temple and enter a turbulent sea, towering over small figures and boats. Low-lying fog extended the painted sea into the gallery, placing viewers between monumental authority and an unstable historical current. Rejecting the Sacred compresses this tension into an encounter: a solitary figure gestures irreverently towards an immense...

Artwork