SENS Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “The Silent Fade of Everything”, featuring the paintings of Chinese artist Ye Zhaofeng. The exhibition will open from 16 March to 20 April 2024. Curated by Zhang Yiying, the exhibition marks Ye’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, following his participation in the gallery’s inaugural booth at the Art021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair in November 2023. The exhibition is a selection of old and new works, visualizing the blurred boundaries that separate physical space from virtual reality.

Each painting highlights the ‘silent fade’ of society, reflecting on the young generations seeking technology to escape from the pressures placed upon them, compromising physical interactions for the digital. Ye’s paintings pay attention to the contradictions in our reality, keenly aware of the phenomenon that surrounds technology and how it has changed human history. There is at last one individual present, all of unique character, knowingly in ‘conversation’ with others. However, they are all ultimately enthralled in their own uses of technology instead of communicating with one another.

One of these contradictions is depicted in a series of works beginning with the title ‘gap’, encapsulating the invisible barrier that forms due to this effect. In the works ‘Living Space’, ‘Gap – Party’, and ‘Gap – Gathering’ (all 2024), Ye creates iconic scenarios where individuals are seated in a space merely functioned for interaction, but do not interact with one another physically, instead opting to use their digital assets to communicate. Ye’s work depicts technology being used as a means of seeking solace from the stress of reality. In these vast vacant spaces, characters feel a lingering feeling of solitude that emanates from the screens of their gadgets, forgetting about the stresses of the world.

Ye deftly expresses the disconnections and distances between individuals and the environments by emanating blurry, somewhat dystopian worlds that are illusionary in nature. In his strong brushstrokes, the artist enhances the discord between objects and the changing environment that surrounds them. Landscaped compositions are a feature in his work, where Ye synthesizes these spaces and locales to create an ideal, cinematic world encompassed by reality. These depictions of life and society encourages the audience to feel as if they are present in the scenes themselves.

“The Silent Fade of Everything” invites audiences to provoke thought on the impact of technology in society today. Ye Zhaofeng’s work explores a mind that longs for an ideal life, which is simultaneously near yet far, attempting to find balance in a stressful life.