Seeking to unveil the invisible fabric of the world, Bai Mengfan captures the most poetic and subtle aspects of urban landscapes. She often depicts mundane objects like tennis balls, road cones, and coins into a constellation of dots along with lines inspired from traffic lines, window lites, or runway markings, in order to compose series of seemingly abstract yet figurative images.
She not only blurs the boundary between abstract and realistic, but also obscures the gap between the representation and the original. While she uses the interplay between extensive linear objects and vivid dotted forms to bring forward tension and dynamics, she paints the background in pure, coherent colors in contrast. She adds granular textures to the canvas to simulate various real-life surfaces, such as pavements and facades. By faithfully reproducing moments and scenes from memory, she invites the audience to look at her works as if looking out of a window, in order to get submerged in the tranquil, meditative atmosphere, and to grasp the mood behind the pictures.
Bai Mengfan combines methods of photorealism with ancient Chinese aesthetics to develop unique methodologies in her art practice. In her most recent exhibitions, Bai Mengfan juxtaposed her contemporary imagery with pictures of cultural and historical significance. She also put images of different sites next to each other to spark conversations between visual elements. By intertwining the past and the now, the here and there, her ultimate passion in art-making is to pictorially re-construct the world based on a new aesthetic order, thus surpassing the constraints of time and space. There, similarly to the galaxies of the universe, asynchronous objects travel freely and converge.
Mengfan Bai (b.1994, China) received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her BFA in oil painting from Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Chengdu, China. Her works have been shown widely in the U.S. and China, including Boers-Li Gallery(New York), carriage trade Gallery(New York), PULSE Art Fair(Miami, FL), Chengdu Art Academy(Chengdu, China), White night gallery(Chengdu, China), etc. Mengfan lives and works in New York City.