“(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
- Mad Girl’s Love Song, Sylvia Plath, 1953

The doppelgänger is many things. Sometimes it refers to an evil-twin, or rather, the bad version of the good. It can be used to describe a stranger whom looks eerily similar to somebody else, with its denotation being somewhat ghostly and paranormal. It is the double-walker, the confused, the other, the unknown. Gillian, this doppelgänger, gently moves in and out of the blurred, racing backgrounds of elegant sound. She carelessly positions herself on a long, thin road, vortices of cash swirling above her aching mind. She runs her hand through her hair as she seductively stares through the lens of her love for the game. She parades through the scenes of these paintings with a defined naivety – one both inspiring and troublesome. Her idealization of the world is obvious through her disillusioned freedom. Her shadow and its influence melt through her face, with a smirk like a Cheshire cat, and eyes lithe and ravenous.

This is the second of a two-part presentation, with the first iteration entitled Jillian. These two converging conditions of the self express the possibility of the simultaneous existence of divergent personalities, ones that intertwine and mess with one another in two plains of interpretation. Gillian and Jillian are constructed characters, solidly far away from each other, with their memories muddy and fading.

Gillian being Yan’s birth-name, is what she introduced herself as when she first immigrated to Toronto in 2011, a name now wrought and admitting deference to her present tense. To her, this name is saturated with her experience of immigration; it is Gillian’s eyes she remembers through. Those that witnessed the alienation of assimilation, confronted the desperations of success and when closed, dreamed only of hopelessness. Yan has approached the process of making as essentially genre-less – as in; there is no fixed stylistic boundary – a choice disparate to the bulk of her previous work, which has been aesthetically controlled. However, these paintings hold movement, and shift, layer upon layer pulsing in and out of a memorialization of Yan’s former self, her other. Therein lies a measure of visual sincerity and vulnerability of her immigrant experience.

Perched on the edge of reality; Gillian’s legacy softly disappears into backgrounds of cash, black stars, and metallic storms, what she thought was hers becomes ambiguous through desperation – she gave in, she deferred to her other.