The title Relative Keys is, ostensibly, a reference to the musical relationship between the relative minor of each major key, and vice versa, although, in Ran’s radically ambiguous idiom, it may denote a relationship between any combination of two keys, not even necessarily musical keys.

If indeed, the uplifting quality popularly associated with the major key is represented anywhere here, it is represented by the Dyonysian, and appears to contain references to German expressionism, a movement that coincided with the political upheavals in the interwar era, the subterranean freedoms and excesses of the Weimar period, and from which sprang orientalist works such as von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), set in Ran’s native China.

Most striking is the way the painting’s form mirrors a type of taijitu — the diagram used to symbolise the yin-yang concept from ancient Chinese philosophy, composed of black and white interlocking spirals. Relative Keys is thus a visual essay, as well as a painting, compiled of references to different dualisms, philosophical, musical and political.

The title Relative Keys is, ostensibly, a reference to the musical relationship between the relative minor of each major key, and vice versa, although, in Ran’s radically ambiguous idiom, it may denote a relationship between any combination of two keys, not even necessarily musical keys.

If indeed, the uplifting quality popularly associated with the major key is represented anywhere here, it is represented by the Dyonysian, and appears to contain references to German expressionism, a movement that coincided with the political upheavals in the interwar era, the subterranean freedoms and excesses of the Weimar period, and from which sprang orientalist works such as von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), set in Ran’s native China.

Most striking is the way the painting’s form mirrors a type of taijitu — the diagram used to symbolise the yin-yang concept from ancient Chinese philosophy, composed of black and white interlocking spirals. Relative Keys is thus a visual essay, as well as a painting, compiled of references to different dualisms, philosophical, musical and political.

The title Relative Keys is, ostensibly, a reference to the musical relationship between the relative minor of each major key, and vice versa, although, in Ran’s radically ambiguous idiom, it may denote a relationship between any combination of two keys, not even necessarily musical keys.

If indeed, the uplifting quality popularly associated with the major key is represented anywhere here, it is represented by the Dyonysian, and appears to contain references to German expressionism, a movement that coincided with the political upheavals in the interwar era, the subterranean freedoms and excesses of the Weimar period, and from which sprang orientalist works such as von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), set in Ran’s native China.

Most striking is the way the painting’s form mirrors a type of taijitu — the diagram used to symbolise the yin-yang concept from ancient Chinese philosophy, composed of black and white interlocking spirals. Relative Keys is thus a visual essay, as well as a painting, compiled of references to different dualisms, philosophical, musical and political.

The title Relative Keys is, ostensibly, a reference to the musical relationship between the relative minor of each major key, and vice versa, although, in Ran’s radically ambiguous idiom, it may denote a relationship between any combination of two keys, not even necessarily musical keys.

If indeed, the uplifting quality popularly associated with the major key is represented anywhere here, it is represented by the Dyonysian, and appears to contain references to German expressionism, a movement that coincided with the political upheavals in the interwar era, the subterranean freedoms and excesses of the Weimar period, and from which sprang orientalist works such as von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), set in Ran’s native China.

Most striking is the way the painting’s form mirrors a type of taijitu — the diagram used to symbolise the yin-yang concept from ancient Chinese philosophy, composed of black and white interlocking spirals. Relative Keys is thus a visual essay, as well as a painting, compiled of references to different dualisms, philosophical, musical and political.