A Study of Anthroplogy is composed of four watercolor images: a fallen body, a burning house, a solitary crow, and a woman holding a child. These scenes do not form a linear narrative but instead appear as fragments drawn from collective memory and the unconscious, pointing to recurring human experiences of injury, destruction, observation, and attachment. The “learning” in the title refers less to knowledge than to an ongoing emotional and existential process—how humans repeatedly attempt to locate themselves within violence, loss, and instability.
The fluid and unstable nature of watercolor keeps the images suspended between emergence and dissolution, reinforcing their sense of uncertainty and historical weight. Figures, animals, and landscapes coexist within the same visual field, forming subtle symbolic relationships: the vulnerability of the body, the collapse of home, the act of witnessing, and the persistence of intimate bonds. Through these reduced yet emotionally charged motifs, A Study of Anthroplogy translates individual experience into a shared human condition, tracing how people continue to endure, interpret, and reconstruct meaning in the face of rupture.
Stephen Yao (b. 1995, graduated from the University of Southern California with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, currently working and residing in North America) explores the predicament of individual existence within the overlapping contexts of East Asian society and post-historical discourse through his painting practice. This examination traverses the realms of history and nature, politics and faith, and paternal and maternal lineages. Influenced by German Romanticism and post-war European painting traditions, his works explore the individual's spiritual agitation in opposition to the sublime within this era of uncertainty.
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