What would Francis Bacon’s paintings look like if he listened to Katy Perry?

The answer can perhaps be found at “Stratospheres," a new exhibit by Brooklyn artist Yuan Fang at Half Gallery in the East Village

By Vittoria Benzine

At the corner of Avenue B and East 4th Street in Manhattan you might find the answer to the question posed in the headline peering back at you through the corner windows at Half Gallery. There, Brooklyn-based artist Yuan Fang’s latest solo show, “Stratospheres,” remains on view through February 11. When you spot the massive canvases resplendent in delirious tangles of color, you’ve made it to the right place.

I first stumbled upon Fang’s work in L.A. last summer at her solo show “Expanse” with Bill Brady Gallery. I was thoroughly taken with the artist’s “abstract futurism,” the sharp points and precarious balance of clashing colors that give her work its novel dynamism. The paintings were midsized there. She’s had a studio upgrade since. In “Stratospheres” they’re huge.

Fang moved her studio from the School of Visual Arts’ facilities in Manhattan to a sunny, spacious workspace in Bed-Stuy, near the Pratt Institute, upon finishing her M.F.A. last year. “I really like that neighborhood because it’s kind of quiet,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine, comparing the enclave to Manhattan’s rat race fervor. Now she savors a coffee on her ambulatory commute to go paint each morning.

Many artists get misty-eyed with memories of drawing on their nursery walls when asked at what point they discovered their creative calling. Shenzhen-born Fang, however, didn’t start making art until the mid 2010s, her early adulthood, when she started sketching “as a way of escaping reality” while battling depression. Slowly, those drawings made the leap to paintings on canvas. “Painting is still a remedy to make me feel happier,” Fang says. “It’s how I cured myself.”

Then, Covid happened, just a year after she earned her bachelor’s from SVA. There’s a marked difference between Fang’s paintings before and after world history intervened. Works across her 2019 show “Liminalities” at Time Gallery, for instance, had looser forms and duller colors. By contrast, “Stratospheres” appears tighter, and thoroughly fluorescent.

“That chaos and unpredictability is becoming part of my canvases,” she says. Her work’s wild abandon continues to fuse world events with her own life experiences. Half Gallery owner Bill Powers suggested the title “Stratospheres” to capture the new velocity in her paintings, which seem to detail how an object can move so fast that physics and gravity relinquish their holds.

Fang says that Powers has also likened her work to a controlled chaos, which is very similar to how Francis Bacon, Fang’s greatest inspiration, once described his own painting practice. Instead of just warping representational forms like Bacon though, Fang conveys otherwise unspeakable truths about the turbulent human experience by fragmenting body parts and transforming them into pure abstraction. Why paint what a viewer could see in reality, anyway? “Those shapes and lines are a metaphor of the human body,” she says.

Fang’s ‘Germination 03,’ 2022 (Courtesy of Half Gallery)

“Yuan Fang paintings are alive in some parallel universe,” Powers says. “In his book on Francis Bacon, [Gilles] Deleuze compliments the painter on his ability to make non-narrative representational art. Bacon’s figures don’t live in the real world. They live in geometry. Yuan’s work operates like that, too.”

Powers first spotted Fang’s work in L.A. too, at a group show last year. “Stratospheres” embodies new momentum and altitude for the artist herself as well. It’s her first show at Half Gallery, which has helped launch art superstars like Emma Stern and another of Fang’s idols, Brooklyn-based artist Anna Park. “I first saw her work in a group show at Half Gallery, three years ago,” Fang says of finding Park’s charcoal drawings.

Now, Fang finds herself in a star-studded position most Brooklyn artists would covet — even if she had to leave the borough to secure the bag. Most of all, she’s excited that her former fears of failing to make a living as a professional artist fell short. All she had to do was never give up.

Working on a larger scale has emphasized the physicality of Fang’s practice. Most pieces, she says, take about 10 days to complete, which is pretty fast for the fine art world but also pretty slow for abstraction. She dances to a diverse soundtrack favoring Top 40 stars like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, while adding shadows and highlights spontaneously in aerosol and oils for intensity and balance. Her playlist somehow captures the chaos of the now.

Fang will have work in a group show in Brussels next month, and contribute another piece to go on view at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas. For now she’s recharging, getting ready to create her next series of work.

“Things are getting more subtle,” the artist says. “The movement in my paintings has become much more consistent.”