Waking on a Sunday morning, and seeing on the opposite wall, a shard of sunlight, beamed in from the curtains above our head, we feel visited with quiet revelation. We know the sun will move, and light with it; we know that, in a minute, we will rise, and go about the business of life. But still, we wait, looking at that play of angular light, that hieroglyph—for what are hieroglyphs, but markings of the sun—and feeling, for a brief, and endless moment, that we are changed.

This is the feeling one gets, looking at Yang Wan’s artwork. Yang’s “Rustling” series of oil diptychs are filled with bright geometries, dreamy convergences of light. On the right panel of Rustling 1, sunlight inches across a wall. On the left, this light has turned amorphous, spilling across the viewer’s line of sight, mimicking the visual phenomenon that gives its name to Yang’s recent solo exhibition at Bromfield Gallery—halation, a kind fog that light makes around the edges of a bright image, photograph, or television screen, a technological halo. If light is Yang’s preoccupation, then her language might be said to shuttle between these two extremes—the hieroglyphic and the haloed, the formal and the formless, the fluid and the crystalline. 

This is as good a heuristic as any to sort her other paintings. Rustling II uses the same, pale creamy colors as the first entry in the series to depict vectors of light that move towards and away from the viewer; the left and right panels look, compositionally, like different snapshots of the swinging doors of a saloon. These are the closest that her work gets, now, to figural art. It took Yang a long time to discover her idiom. She received formal training in realist oil painting at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her early work has clear referents—Look at U!! appears to be a set of stuffed animals, staring at the viewer from behind the glass at a claw crane game. Broken Benches, is, true to its name, a row of cheap, plastic seats, but one broken accidentally. She painted Outcast lately, which seems to depict a couch, thrown out onto the pavement; but whose depthless quality, and thickly textured paint, seem to anticipate the later explorations of light’s materiality.

Much work goes into Yang’s paintings. They take her anywhere from a week to a month just to prime—she smears plaster on the paintings, scraping it as it dries, and reapplying it. It is this painstaking process that earned her praise from David Kiehl, the curator of the Whitney Museum of Art, who pointed out that her use of wood, and plaster, created a rich sense of layering for her works. The work is affective, too—the inspiration behind the “Rustling” series, for example, comes from a poem by Du Fu: “a good rain knows its season/ and comes when spring is here/ on the heels of the wind it slips secretly into the night/ silent and soft, moistening everything.” If Yang’s work deals with “Chineseness,” it does so while avoiding the tired, trite stereotypes associated with that word. It is Du’s evocation of quietude, secrecy, and temporal change, that make it onto her compositions, not a set of ethnic tags. 

Yang’s creative practice continues to evolve; of the solo shows she has mounted in 2018, several works, like The Melody of Sunset and Poems, are natural extensions of Rustling; but the shards of light have grown in number, and turned darker in color, recalling early Suprematist art. Other pieces search in new directions; vertical compositions like The Last Bohemian and Rhizome are painted with thick, black pigment. The artist of the quiet revelation, remains, however. One sees, beneath the new attempts, similar figures, steeped in silence, bathed in light.