YUAN FANG: SPAYING

SKARSTEDT CHELSEA is pleased to announce Spaying, Yuan Fang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

September 04 – October 25, 2025

In this deeply personal and formally rigorous body of work, Fang turns inward, offering a meditation on illness, identity, and the intricate architecture of womanhood. In addition to her large-scale canvases, Fang will debut a suite of smaller, more intimate paintings—what the artist refers to as “subplots,” fragments of a larger, lived narrative.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the medical and emotional ramifications of Fang’s recent breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments, functioning as a reference not only to the potential biological consequences of her treatment, but also the literal act of cutting—a gesture central to her process. Through cycles of modification, layering, and erasure, Fang pares down each composition until a dominant “entity” emerges. These central forms, always abstract yet bodily, function as torsos, anchoring each painting with a visceral sense of presence. “I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Fang notes, and indeed, each image carries that charge, meeting the viewer with both the emotional weight of her experience and a visual strength that builds like a storm on the horizon.

New to this body of work is Fang’s embrace of negative space. Informed by the tradition of “leaving blank” in Chinese painting, these compositional voids focus the viewer’s attention on what remains. Separately, the rhythm of her studio practice has slowed, inviting longer periods of contemplation and greater attention to detail. The resulting compositions feel more deliberate with each painting charged with quiet intensity.

Autobiographical threads run throughout. Several works incorporate the artist’s own medical imaging subtly embedded in the compositions, such as Accumulating, Breaking Through the Defense Line. Others channel the psychic toll of external expectation and all of the rage, pressure, and fatigue that accompany it.