Amsterdam

STEVENSON is pleased to present My Heartbeat Singing at Midnight, Cian-Yu Bai’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

It began with an encounter with a unicorn. Following her last solo exhibition at the gallery in 2023, Bai spent a year travelling to places that had haunted her, to see the images that had taken up residence in her mind’s eye, sometimes decades ago, in real life. Among these was The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, one of the seven so-called ‘Unicorn Tapestries’ at the Cloisters, an outpost of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Woven in fine wool and silk with silver and gilded threads, they were in all likelihood designed in France, and produced in either present-day Belgium or southern Netherlands at the very end of the Middle Ages. Much about their origins, as well as their intended symbolism, remains shrouded in mystery.

As Bai stood in front of the object, the goal of her pilgrimage, she recalled an earlier set of horse images that had a great impact on her. As a young girl, she had become obsessed with a set of stamps in her mother’s collection, depicting horse breeds from across Asia. She made a bargain with her mother: if she came first in her class three consecutive terms, the stamps would be hers. She succeeded. Another pilgrimage led Bai to Rome, to see the works of the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Apollo and Daphne, the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, but above all is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. In the Vatican she saw Michelangelo's Pietà. Her wanderlust also led her to the north. One of the reasons she settled in Amsterdam is its bleak winters, and after earlier trips to Iceland she now explored Finland and Denmark. In Copenhagen she visited The Little Mermaid and museum Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. In Finland she was searching less for specific artworks, but tracing her childhood memory of the book Love from the Moomins and for the extreme natural phenomena that have inspired Nordic myths and legends.

The imagery in Bai’s new body of paintings builds on earlier ones. We see a parallel world of owls, swans and mermaids. It is not a coherent universe, but draws on a wide range of fairy-tale traditions, mixing the mythical with the mystical and romantic visions of nature with otherworldly, unnatural beings. There are no unicorns, but there is a translucent horse. Bernini is everywhere. And while not a direct reference, the Scandinavian imagery might remind one of Ilon Wikland’s original illustrations of Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter, the Astrid Lindgren children’s novel (now available as a Netflix series). Bai’s universe resists the rational worldview that controls daily life, and it would not be a stretch to see it more directly as a form of resistance to the complex situation of the current world and destruction that spouts from our screens.

However, while the imagery presents a continuous thread to earlier exhibitions, the manner of working has shifted significantly. Most visibly through the introduction of oil stick, a medium that reflects light differently, and leaves traces of its making in a manner very different to Bai’s highly controlled acrylics. This is an outward sign of another, more profound shift. The oil stick forms a layer, and through this cumulative process, Bai estimates that she spends anywhere from three to ten times as much time on each work – adding layers, editing the composition, pushing back and pulling forward elements until they sit just right.

This new, more layered way of working has shifted how Bai sees the images, too. Where previously she spoke of her paintings as capturing specific moments, and specific moods, she now imagines them more as allegories, much like the unicorn in the garden. They aim to capture something larger than a fleeting feeling, something more humanist, more eternal. Yet, like The Unicorn Tapestries, they resist easy decoding, and Bai is in no rush to offer explanations. She states:

For me every painting is a non-verbal vocabulary. In my new paintings I continue this core idea to create different non-verbal vocabularies for those who cannot find words to sufficiently express their feelings, to describe the hope and hopelessness of harsh situations in life. Art is always a shelter for those broken by our imperfect world. Through this exhibition I hope to create paintings as safe places, for every soul to stay when our mental and physical states suffer from being in an unsafe environment. I think art still carries the ability to heal people, and can be a reflection to help people go through and beyond pain.

The exhibition opens Wednesday 2 April, 5 to 7pm. Bai will give a walkabout on the day of the opening at 6pm.