Soft Colour Wheel
Yan Lei
颜磊
Production date
2014
Object Detail
Media
Tibetan highland wool
Measurements
298 x 298 cm
Notes
Art writer and director of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Philip Tinari describes Yan Lei as someone who has always been sympathetic to the artworld’s underclass. He has produced installations (most notably at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum in 2012) in which all the paintings were produced by paid workers. Similarly, his “Colour Wheel” series of paintings that recall American Pop Artist Jasper Johns’ painted targets has become one of Yan’s trademarks, executed in unmodulated acrylics by untrained workers according to a numerically sequenced palette. Yan Lei told Hans Ulrich Obrist: ‘The colour wheel paintings belong to an extended series. The colour in the middle ramifies out according to a numerical algorithm and then the next colour wheel painting begins with the last colour that this has arrived at.’ More recently, Yan designed a series of ‘Soft Colour Wheel’ rugs utilising the same imagery to be hand-made as unique pieces from the finest Tibetan wool, characteristically blurring the distinctions between high art, design and functional objects.
Accession number
2019.057