Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, what strikes first about Yan Bing is his incredible ability to transform an ordinary tuber into a monument, a simple mushroom into a mystical apparition, an apricot blossom into silent meditation. For eight years, Yan Bing painted potatoes. EIGHT YEARS. Potatoes! Not nymphs, not spectacular mountains, not celebrity faces. Potatoes cut, whole, half-peeled. He looked at them like no one before him, granting them a dignity usually reserved for royal portraits.
Born in 1980 in Tianshui, Gansu Province, this son of peasants traversed the arid deserts, endless steppes, and remote villages of northwestern China on foot before venturing into the world of contemporary art. His painting is rooted in the experience of this unforgiving land, where every drop of water counts, where every plant is a miracle. Yan Bing undertook a fifty-day journey across Gansu, driving his black pickup alone, stopping to paint in the middle of nowhere. His exhibition ‘Suddenly, Everything Became Clear’ at ShanghART in 2021 showed us the fruit of this odyssey: tiny but tenacious wild vegetables emerging from cracked earth. Clouds walking like mystical creatures on the horizon. Animal bones eroded by the wind, silent testimonies of the passage of time.
His series of mushrooms, begun in 2018, presents these fragile organisms as sentient beings, almost endowed with their own consciousness. Unlike his earthy and solid potatoes, these mushrooms are mysterious, elongated, almost phantom-like, emerging from the shadows like apparitions. Yan Bing paints in a dark and rich palette, his objects emerging from almost black backgrounds, illuminated by a light whose source remains invisible. It is an inner light, that of contemplation and revelation.
Looking at these works, I immediately thought of Albert Camus and his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. To understand Yan Bing, one must grasp this central Camusian notion of the absurd: man seeks meaning in a world that offers none. Yet, it is in this very tension that a form of redemption is found.
Yan Bing, like Sisyphus, is fully aware of the apparent futility of his endeavor. Painting potatoes for eight years might seem as absurd as eternally pushing a rock to the top of a mountain. But as Camus writes: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’.[1]
In his painting ‘Cut Potatoes No.1’ (2012), Yan shows us a row of sectioned tubers, their flesh exposed like open wounds. These tubers, rotting before our eyes, seem to defy our desire for immortality, our quest for meaning. And yet, Yan paints them with such attention, such respect, that they acquire a metaphysical dimension.
Camus’s fundamental intuition, that of a world silent in the face of human questions, finds an echo in Yan Bing’s approach. The artist focuses on the humblest objects, those that do not ‘speak’, that mean nothing beyond their bare existence, and transforms them into vehicles of deep meditation on our condition.
As Camus writes: ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer’.[2] This phrase could serve as a caption for the wild vegetables that Yan painted in the Gansu desert. These ordinary plants, that no one notices, become under his brush symbols of resistance, manifestations of an obstinate vitality in the face of the world’s hostility.
The silence of the vast desert spaces of Gansu, which Yan knows intimately, recalls that ‘unreasonable silence of the world’ that Camus speaks of. In this silence, the absurd is born, but also freedom. This is perhaps why Yan Bing felt the need to return to these spaces, to cross them alone, as if to reconnect with this fundamental experience of the absurd, which is also an experience of freedom.
Yan Bing’s approach to everyday objects is reminiscent of the theories of humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan on our experience of space. In his work ‘Space and Place’, Tuan distinguishes space as an abstract concept and place as a lived reality, charged with emotions and memories[3]. What Yan Bing does with his still lifes is precisely to transform neutral ‘spaces’ into intimate ‘places’, charged with personal and collective meaning. The mushroom is no longer simply a biological organism; it becomes a place of memory, a space for contemplation. Tuan writes that ‘place is a pause in movement’[4]. Yan Bing’s paintings perfectly embody this idea. They are pauses in the continuous flow of existence, moments when the gaze stops on what would usually go unnoticed.
In his ‘Pear Blossom’ series, Yan captures the ephemeral moment when white flowers bloom on bare branches. For the inhabitants of northwestern China, these flowers announce spring after a brutal winter. They represent what Tuan would call a ‘topophilia’, an affective bond between people and place. Yan Bing instinctively understands that the experience of place is not merely visual but multisensory. He paints the rough textures of potatoes, the velvety moisture of mushrooms, the airy lightness of pear blossoms, in such a way that the viewer can almost touch them, feel them.
Tuan’s notion of ‘topophilia’ is particularly relevant for understanding Yan Bing’s recent paintings, those born of his journey through Gansu. These arid landscapes, wild vegetables, wandering clouds are manifestations of the deep bond that the artist maintains with his native land. It is not a sentimental or nostalgic bond, but something deeper, almost visceral.
Tuan emphasizes how the experience of place is shaped by our body and senses. Yan Bing, who worked the land in his youth, who planted and harvested potatoes, who walked under the scorching sun of Gansu, translates this bodily experience into his paintings. His potatoes are not simply ‘seen’; they are ‘known’ through lived experience. ‘A place’, writes Tuan, ‘is the center of felt values’[5]. The objects that Yan Bing paints, potatoes, mushrooms, wild vegetables, are precisely such centers of value. They are not chosen for their conventional beauty, but for their significance in a system of values rooted in the experience of rural life in northwestern China.
What distinguishes Yan Bing from other contemporary painters is his ability to transform these ordinary objects into bearers of universal meaning, while preserving their anchoring in a specific local experience. This is exactly what Tuan considers the mark of a true ‘sense of place’, both deeply personal and widely communicable.
Yan Bing’s art nevertheless defies easy categorization. It is neither traditionally Chinese, nor Westernized, nor conceptual, nor purely formal. It is an art born of patient observation and direct experience. Yan Bing’s journey in Gansu was not a search for the picturesque, but a confrontation with his own history, with what shaped him as a man and an artist. The works that result have a different quality from his earlier paintings. The backgrounds are lighter, the objects less monumental, as if Yan had found a form of peace, or at least a more comfortable distance from his past.
Yan Bing does not offer us easy images, simple narratives, or obvious political messages. Instead, he gives us the opportunity to slow down, to look carefully, and perhaps to discover in these everyday objects something we had neglected, a beauty, a dignity, a presence. In a world saturated with flashy images and constant stimulation, his painting reminds us of the value of silence, attention, and patience. It invites us to see potatoes, mushrooms, wild vegetables not as mere objects, but as companions in life, silent witnesses to our shared humanity.
So the next time you peel a potato or cut a mushroom, think of Yan Bing. Really look at these humble organisms. And perhaps, just perhaps, you will begin to see them with new eyes.
- Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, Gallimard, 1942.
- Camus, Albert. Return to Tipasa in The Summer, Gallimard, 1954.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
- Ibid.
- Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, Columbia University Press, 1974.
