Yan Wei
ECLIPSES is an ongoing body of work exploring how emotion, memory, and individual experience are shaped within larger social and collective structures. Rooted in the artist’s upbringing in an industrial city in northeast China, the project reflects on environments where personal feelings were often suppressed beneath dominant narratives of order, labor, and collective identity.
Through large-scale charcoal drawings, painting, and text, Yan Wei constructs fragmented visual fields where figures, animals, industrial landscapes, and symbolic elements coexist in unstable relationships. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the works invite viewers into a space of shifting perception—where images and emotions remain partially obscured, unresolved, and continuously in transition.
The title ECLIPSES refers to states of partial visibility: experiences that do not disappear, but become covered, displaced, or difficult to articulate. Across the series, expression, body, and environment overlap and interrupt one another, forming a visual language shaped by tension, compression, and quiet resistance.
