“Cross the Ocean” 

Poul Nielsen & Yulin Wang

Curated by Deborah Forbes & Leif Moon Nielsen

Dates: September 12 – November 8, 2025
Reception: Friday, September 12 @ 6:00pm
Location: Yuill Family Gallery @ Medalta

Exhibition Statement

Cross the Ocean flows through the bodies of work of Poul Nielsen and Yulin Wang in various ways. Literally, they have shown work together across an ocean, in China and North America for more than twenty years – they have crossed the ocean together many times from Medicine Hat, Canada to Nanjing, China, hand-ferrying their works for exhibition. Figuratively, their works are oceans apart yet flow together through their enduring friendship and relationship to the viewer.

Cross the Ocean also reads as a command: be brave, be bold, expand creative reach, keep your eyes on the horizon and on the ocean surface. It is perhaps this command that leads viewers into their works. Both Nielsen’s and Wang’s works invite the viewer to flow in rather than stand outside. They capture attention from a distance, then draw the viewer in, step by step.

“Atmospheric Probabilities” by Poul Nielsen

Nielsen’s pastel work is reminiscent of the Colour Field paintings of 1950s New York, particularly Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who abandoned all suggestions of figuration – Nielsen’s work also invites these notions. Nielsen writes of Atmospheric Probabilities: “… [they are] an expressive response to and celebration of the extraordinary light and colour that I experience on a daily basis in my unique prairie environment. The exceptional colour of the Indigenous Blackfoot has [also] influenced me.”

“Bogu” by Yulin Wang

Wang writes: “Bogu is the fusion of beauty and conceptual, a dialogue between illusion and the soul.” Further, the title is a combination of “bo” which roughly translates to mean expansive, and “gu” referring to antiquity. Both the figurative works and the portraits of ceramic pieces from the Ming and Qing Dynasty take us on journeys from contemporary to historical and back again.

Wang’s Three Graces is inspired by The Three Graces (1659) of French engraver, Claude Mellan and the sculpture The Three Graces (1814) of Antonio Canova, reminiscent of the 2nd century BCE statue from Greek antiquity. Wang has brought the Three Graces into the contemporary by using three Canadian prairie girls as models.