Since its move to the new Yongshupu Lu location, Aura is out there "out there," however its newest show, Departure, sticks to classical techniques and themes. Yin Zhouhui amd Yin Zhaoyu's paintings abound with despair, isolation and ephemeral emotions, yet somehow "the images of both artists are asexual." The first Yin addresses introspective isolation, painting interlocked fingers and other humanoid parts, while the second Yin focuses on the vastness of the universe through Turner-esque horizon pieces.

Social practice, knowledge accumulation and technological development have shaped the profile of the observer. As artists, Yin Zhaohui and Yin Zhaoyu propose to raise an observational system in the standardized and denaturalized public consciousness. Their proposal regards the time span of our visions and the lifelessness in their paintings suggests afterimage. The ephemerality and the desolation break the sense of continuum, and a new density of time settles.

In terms of their attempts and approaches, Yin Zhaohui and Yin Zhaoyu have gone through two opposite extremes. Yin Zhaoyu has classical and romantic eyes and hands, his works are reminiscent of British romanticist J.M.W. Turner's art. A remote horizon gives out a mythic ambiance, reminding the audience of the view looking out from an airport. The refined perspective and the grand field of vision are like the scenes a traveler enjoys during his journey. And the cosmopolitanism, anonymity and sense of deja vu carried in his paintings come from his observation of the fast flowing and commercial images ubiquitous in our life.

On the contrary, Yin Zhaohui's observation is inward but his keen representation of hands and bodies can be compared to the photography of John Coplans, who interprets his aesthetics with his own flesh. The images of both of the artists are asexual. Nonetheless Coplans is pursuing eternity through his sculptural fashion and Yin Zhaohui is presenting, in an age that physical icons are consumed excessively, the body parts that can't be replaced or erased by images. The partially enlarged human organs are transformed, by the observant artist, into a smooth, asexual specimen, not unlike the cold wax statues displayed in museums. The statues are installed there to meet the cruel desire of their viewers.


Lighting in regard to Observation

Turner's application of lights and colors was based on the advancement of observational methodology in the 19th century. In his paintings completed during the 1830s and the 1840s, an unfixed illuminant was reflected by all kinds of materials along multiple planes, the mingled lights and colors eventually infiltrated into every secretive part of the paintings. With similar endeavors, both Turner and Yin Zhaoyu have created a distance between the audience and the field of vision; nonetheless, the void between the objects in the paintings subtly gives them a sense of substantiality.

With unprecedented application of lights and colors, Turners's artworks mark the different status of observers in the 19th century. "Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory)