Room for Salivation

About

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Room for Salivation, an exhibition by A.I.R. 2019-2020 Fellow Crys Yin. Her new body of drawings and paintings explores the complicated intersection of desire and shame, and the power that lies in revealing one’s truest impulses, no matter how perverse—or mouth-watering. 

Stemming from an intense and unsatisfied childhood longing that grew with the artist into a more complex temptation, Room for Salivation is a hedonistic confrontation of Yin’s fiercest cravings, a livid exposé of want. Rendered in opulent excess both luscious and repulsively carnal, the monumental drawings at the center of Yin’s installation herald the object of her fascination and humiliation in marbled, greasy accumulations of crayon. Simplifying form to the point of abstraction—blurring the line between black and white, right and wrong—Yin points to fleshly mortification as itself only a facade for more insidious attacks on the self. 

Centered on its own wall, Neither Be Spit Nor Swallowed, 2020, illustrates a psychosomatic disorder known as plum pit qi, first described by the 220 A.D. Han Dynasty clinical text Jin Gui Yao Lue as a hysterical condition suffered by women in which psychological distress manifests in physical form. Recently diagnosed with this disorder, Yin visualizes her shame and embeds it in the surface of this wood panel as a material blockage to a painted throat. 

Teasingly, if earnestly, speaking to the undue stress felt by a body in conflict with itself and to secrecy’s ability to stifle the experience of joy, Yin’s desirous divulgence purges delicacy, pretense, and, with them, the fear of vulnerability. Playful in content and gesture, the works aspire to childlike openness, encouraging the empowering potential of honesty with others and with oneself.