Ascension: this is the key word about man in the East, where man is never something immutable with rights given to him once and for all, but becomes himself, humanizes himself to the extent that he surpasses, overcomes himself. Human life in the East is built along a vertical axis and is hierarchical in nature. The man of the East is called to go to Heaven, and the more heavenly in him, the more human in him. This is the “heavenly humanism” of the East, deeply different from the “earthly humanism” of the West.

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Tatyana Yan's paintings seem to me to be one of the most convincing evidence in modern art of the “heavenly” destiny of man. I find this evidence in the special piercing gaze of the artist, who knows how to discover in things the power of pure materiality, overwhelming and dissolving the familiar objective world in its explosive dynamism, but only in order to affirm the enduring qualities of material existence. An even more reliable evidence of the “heavenly fullness” of life – always only anticipated and remembered – is the very special internal sphericity of Tatyana Yan’s gaze, which gives her paintings the quality of a meditative experience. This is the quality of inner, absent depth, immeasurable distance, which opens to enlightened consciousness, i.e. consciousness awakened to the presence of the world body. The superposition of different planes of vision, the displacement of natural images and human writings, the gaping abyss of transformations in an instantaneous impression are signs of this universal sphere, unfolding on the plane of the picture with the eternal curvature of space.

(from the article accompanying the exhibition catalogue)