Opening Reception/Artist Talk will be held on Sunday, June 23, 2019 at 2:00PM.  The YV=Yin&Viktor, WE=all artists who have been here, exhibition period is June 9 to September 30, 2019

The main focus of the exhibition is a series of paintings subtitled “MY MASTERS” by Yin Peet, the co-founder of CAI and the art ground YV Art Museum. The exhibition includes more than 20 acrylic paintings, some are monumental in size.  The show is about Yin as a figurative painter.  While the trend in Art has always been racing for something new, in this show Yin is looking back and trying again to study her “Masters” after having been influenced by them over the past 30 years of her art life. She humors them, celebrates them and questions them.

To announce the naming of YV Art Museum, Yin has painted a 24 feet by 15 feet mural entitled “The Monument Valley” in the main hall. It is based on the memory of a trip Yin and Viktor took driving through 22 states to try to understand the US, this huge country, in 2008. The painting is indeed “monumental” in many ways. By placing Viktor and herself, both first generation immigrants, in the middle of the Monument Valley, the prominent American scenery is an iconic and amusing statement for YV Art Museum.

Furthermore, to reinstate the artistic, spiritual journey, with exaggeration Yin characterizes Viktor’s portraits Eye-Ear-Nose-Tongue-Mind to make the foundation of Buddhist theory tangible. She draws the essentials of its content, incorporating simple but provocative elements and subtly made her Buddhist philosophy and Daoist background known to her viewers.

Yin’s figurative work expresses her sense of freedom. Covering one entire wall of the Gallery is a painting entitled “Day And Night” (38 feet by 10 feet).
 The epic goes – on a regular day and a regular night, human being walks on… We always thought we are going forward and better, but if we investigate more “carefully”, we would see that we are going back to where we started and repeating what we have been doing on the route of this endless wheel Mobius (which some also call Fate)! It’s a fraught human condition that we cannot help but to live another day and another night and rarely contemplate on how it ends.

Having trained mainly as a sculptor, like most contemporary artists in the 20th-21stcentury, Yin has experienced the rise of inter-disciplinary installation and performance art in the 1980s-90s. As most of the projects of those genres were involving experimental elements, cross disciplines and managing collaborations with other performers, by necessity, Yin had to put on many hats—proposal writer, curator, project director, administrator, coordinator, performer, just to name a few. As a result, she created the non-profit organization CAI.

In the recent 30 years, we often hear comments about an exhibition such as, “it’s a curator’s show, not an artists’ show”.  Indeed it is one of the important reasons for contemporary artists who are using unconventional material/form to take the curating power/fate into their own hand.  It is this environment that prompted Yin and Viktor, the two founders of this art ground to create an art space like YV Art Museum that hopefully encompassing open mind, critical eye, and shows by artists.

Yin Peet migrated from Taiwan to the US in 1982, and had resided mainly in Nepal from 1984-1988, which shaped her multi-cultural views in life and had critically impacted her as an artist. She earned her BA in English Literature from Soochow University in Taiwan and an MFA in sculpture from the Massachusetts College of Art, and has been an adjunct faculty at the College of the Holy Cross from 2000-2013.

This show opens the 2019 exhibition season in YV Art Museum. In addition to Yin’s Painting, our museum walls are also showing a permanent collection of artwork by guest artists who have taken residency at CAI in the past, and of course, the upstairs Gallery showing Viktor’s kinetic sculpture, musical instrument.  A spotlight of Viktor will come later in the exhibition season.