Longings and Belonging: The Paintings and Drawings of Laetitia Yhap
Laetitia Yhap
On view until 30 September, 2022
Yanlan Arts and Culture Foundation | Beijing
Curated by Tabula Rasa Gallery

Tabula Rasa Gallery in collabroation with Yanlan Arts and Culture foundation present the legendary British female artist Laetitia Yhap’s solo exhibition titled Longings and Belonging in China for the first time at her age of 80. The exhibition will be held in the new space of Yanlan Culture and Art Foundation.

Laetitia Yhap is legendary not because of her special identity as Chinese descent in British art world: she was born in London and is "a profoundly rooted person", but her father was Chinese and her mother Austrian; She is legendary for the unparalleled importance of her unique creation in British art history since 1970s: she has lived in Hastings, a southeastern fishery town, for more than 50 years and created her most famous series of paintings with irregular shapes and lucid composition that record the everyday life of fishermen along the coastline, especially her method to the use of found objects and ready-made for painting framing, which echoes the renaissance fresco cycles and altar pieces and the early renaissance paintings mixing the everyday and the sacred.

Laetitia has been focusing on the world of fishermen in which she lives for decades, integrating perfectly the characters, backgrounds and scenery in her paintings and drawings. The great power of expression formed by the layers of foreground and background in the pictures makes the audience feel deeply the inseparable interdependence of the sea and the fishing port. In the world of fishing port where the real daily life and the unknown sea are intertwined: the group of workers dominated by males go sailing to catch fishes facing the waves; or go ashore to rest relying on the boat, or drink and chat with friends after a hard day's work. The details and processes in these scenes of working and living under the brush of Laetitia demonstrate one of the core principles of Italian neorealism “Don't create ‘the hero’, every ordinary person is a hero”: with dignity and loneliness, emerging from the artist's creation, pursuing the ordinary life and looking for eternity in the historical significance.

Tabula Rasa Books also published an exhibition catalogue dedicated to Laetitia Yhap’s exhibition.
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Laetitia Yhap (b.1941) is a British painter living in Hastings, Sussex, well-known for her meticulous and bold depiction of the everyday life of fishermen on the fishing coast in Hastings, East England. Graduated from Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1962 and supported by the Leverhulme Research Scholarship, she travelled to Italy for a year in 1962, looking at Renaissance art and architecture before returning to Slade School of Fine Art to do a postgraduate degree from 1963 to 1965. Since 1967, she settled in Hastings and started her most famous series, a series of paintings with irregular shapes that record the everyday life of fishermen along the coastline. Immersing herself in the maritime world day in day out, her works are the tableau vivant that celebrate the fishing tradition of East Hastings, while her unique artistic style marks Yhap’s unparalleled importance in British art history. As the curator and art historian of the Tate Gallery, Richard Morphet, wrote, ‘celebrating both the compulsion of observation and the complex reality  of existence, each of these images opens a world and makes it permanently fresh.’

Laetitia Yhap has exhibited extensively in several institutions such as Hayward Gallery (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Royal Academy of Arts (London), Serpentine Gallery (London), Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool). Solo exhibitions include: Summer Show 1, Serpentine Gallery (London, 1979), Laetitia Yhap: Fishing Paintings, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery (Hastings, 1984), Laetitia Yhap: The Business of the Beach, Camden Art Centre (London, 1988 – 89); Shoreline, Riviera Gallery (Hastings, 1991), Laetitia Yhap: Elements 1963 – 1974, Stormont Studios (Rye, 1991), My Vital Life, Laetitia Yhap at 80, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery (Hastings, 2020), Laetitia Yhap: Longings and Belonging, Yanlan Arts and Culture Foundation (Beijing, 2022). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery, the British Council, Contemporary Art Society, Nueld Society, and the New Hall Art Collection at University of Cambridge.