With Oracle at Dusk, presented by Hurst Contemporary in London, Yirui Fang (born 1997, living between Beijing and London) approaches painting as a perceptual threshold – a point where vision is not merely representation, but a form of knowledge. His canvases unfold as territories where chromatic matter expands, stratifies, and dissolves, evoking the instability of time and the imperceptible motion of thought.
Yirui Fang, “Oracle and Dusk”, exhibition view, 2025, Hurst Contemporary, courtesy Hurst Contemporary
In Fang’s practice, painting breathes. Each mark seems to emerge like a liquid memory, suspended between the meditative precision of calligraphy and the emotional intensity of gestural abstraction, between the stillness of emptiness and the density of color. His work is born from an interior tension between control and surrender: the surface becomes a field of constant negotiation between the chaos of matter and the order of form, between intuition and reflection. Oracle at Dusk (Unspoken Words) unfolds precisely along this threshold. The twilight evoked by the title is not merely a transition of light, but a state of mind – the moment when vision begins to shift, when the world ceases to appear clearly and reveals itself in its ambiguity. Drawing on mythic and symbolic references – echoes of both Greek and Eastern traditions – Fang constructs a pictorial language that probes the relationship between image and knowledge.
Yirui Fang, “Oracle and Dusk”, exhibition view, 2025, Hurst Contemporary, courtesy Hurst Contemporary
His floating forms, suspended between structure and dissolution, do not describe but suggest; they do not narrate, but invite contemplation. The exhibition develops as a perceptual device: each work is a field of tension between light and darkness, presence and disappearance. The dusky tones – violet, blue, gold, and ochre – act as voices in a visual chorus, alternating between silence and whisper. Color becomes temporal, expanding within the viewer’s mental space like an exhalation. Fang seems to paint not what he sees, but what remains after the image has vanished. His practice aligns with a generation of artists reclaiming the slowness of painting as an act of resistance. In an era dominated by digital immediacy, Fang constructs spaces that evade reproducibility, entrusting the materiality of paint with the task of holding what cannot be spoken. The “unspoken words” of the subtitle become a metaphor for an interior language – one that vibrates between consciousness and dream.
Yirui Fang, “Oracle and Dusk”, exhibition view, 2025, Hurst Contemporary, courtesy Hurst Contemporary
If the tradition of abstract painting – from Rothko to Zao Wou-Ki – sought transcendence through color and light, Fang proposes a more intimate, sensorial reimagining: transcendence replaced by fragility, monumentality by impermanence. In this sense, his work does not seek truth but a temporary balance – a fragment of silence between things. In Oracle at Dusk, twilight becomes a metaphor for contemporary perception: a suspended time where images form and dissolve, where meaning does not assert itself but gradually unfolds. Fang invites us to look more slowly, to linger within doubt, to recognize painting not as a resolutive language but as a site of waiting. It is within this in-between – between the word and its echo, between vision and memory – that Yirui Fang’s painting finds its strength. An oracle that does not foretell, but returns to us the awareness that every gaze, like the light of dusk, is already on the verge of fading.
Info:
Yirui Fang. Oracle at dusk
10/10 – 07/11/2025
Hurst Contemporary
18 Percy Strett, Londra (UK)
www.hurstcontemporary.com
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
NO COMMENT