YveYANG invites you to spend Valentine’s Day with us.

There are many questions in our mind that are worth slowing down and thinking through after experiencing so many facets aspects of the art market since we opened the gallery from 2016. Why do we want to do this gallery? Is it necessary to run a physical space? What is the future of small-scale galleries? How does art impact the public in 2018 or further? Should art have an authority? And is art even necessary to current society? Much like a gallery, an artist will question the state of self from one stage to next stage, not only to themselves, but also to the world around them: Why do I still want to make art? For how long I could insist on being an artist? And what does art mean to me in different stages of my life? This is a conversation with yourself, and a talk through your artwork with outside too.

Our new plans will seek to answer these questions: we will reopen our New York location this spring following a renovation of the space. In the meantime, the exhibition program of YveYANG will follow the physical location of Yve and Chando, either in New York or in China. We will still sell works, but we will only mount shows that fit with our core mission: showing art that can only be made by the present. The gallery has no necessity to exist if we were unable to represent art that we really admire.

In preparation for the changes to our space, and in response to its role in our lives as gallerists and curators, we have gathered thousands of objects from our life and the gallery's, inviting artists to pick whatever resonates with them and to make art from it. The rest of the works on view are from collaborating artists, who selected their works specifically for this space and for this special moment. It is different from what we've done before, as the exhibition is full of unknowns before installing. As a gallery, we want to give up some control over this show, and let the artists fully decide what and how they want to show within the space given its history and our current situation. There will be a performance as well, an improvised experimental music performance conducted by Vicente Vergara Wilson on the following Saturday after opening.

The title, Time Square, is not only because the gallery location is quite close to Times Square, but also because of the recent movie "The Square". In the first scene of the film, a journalist is interviewing the chief curator from a famed museum, asking him to explain a quite complicated state that the curator had previously made. Struggling to explain, the curator uses Duchamp’s Fountain as an example: the museum is the everything to an artwork; anything could be art if it enters into the room of a museum. So, what will art be without the space to show it?

Review by Qianfan Gu, Art Forum China: http://artforum.com.cn/picks/section=world#picks11217