Exhibition Statement:

For more than two years, Wang Xin has been exploring subjects such as the therapeutic in relation to artificial intelligence, and the possibilities of making further use of the technology in supporting future psychological developments and healing. For the exhibition, Wang Xin presents new artworks that involve sound elements essential to therapeutic processes. Continuously and simultaneously the installation works generate sounds; taken together, it is a symphony of healing sounds that penetrates the whole of the exhibition. The thematic aspect of the exhibition as a totality also pertains to the idea of a psychological healing process.

Temptation - a solo project by Fan Xi

For the Discovery section of Art Basel Hong Kong 2022, CLC Gallery Venture proposes to present Fan Xi’s solo project “Temptation”.

The first installation of the “Temptation” series was shown at the artist’s exhibition “When To Sail?” at the Guangdong Museum Of Art in 2020; it was created after participating in a residency program on the island of Pulau Dinawan, Malaysia. In the middle of the island that is an atoll, is an elevated rain forest largely inaccessible, as it is surrounded by wild, interwoven tropical plants.

Fan Xi was inexplicably lured by the rain forest when she was the artist-in-residence on the island, and looked forward to venturing deep into it. At night, the rain forest that was pitch black was stunningly horrifying. Fan Xi: “After being tormented by the desire for about a week, I finally threw myself into this trap.” She took a large number of photos as she ventured forth, which she put to use as material to re-stage the seductive and horrifying rain forest labyrinth. The photographically flattened and collaged group of plants once again becomes voluminous and voluptuous, as it inhabits a new dimensional body, and brings about dizziness. The narrative structure of seduction or trap often appears in classical myths and allegories, pertaining frequently to personification or deification of nature. Constructing a space of distorted perspective, scale and chiaroscuro, Fan Xi’s “Temptation” tears apart or closes the psychological relationship between human and nature.

The newly created work “Temptation” for Discovery in Hong Kong Basel occupies the whole of the booth in a distinctly nimble and substantial way. The Temptation series has been in constant evolvement eversince version 1.0, that is both in terms of medium execution and concept development. The current modification distills types of tropical plant form both in structure and in dimensional quality, which are translated into a series of semi-fixed spatial objects. Thus the expression of Temptation now opts for a greater diversity of forms and dimensional experiences on a linear thought path rather than a singular sensory impact to overwhelm.

West Bund Art and Design 2021

2021.11.11 - 2021.11.14

Booth B307

West Bund Art Center, 2555 Long Teng Ave. Xuhui District, Shanghai

Participating Artists：

Henk Visch

Zhang Miao

Wu Di

Zhang Shujian

Wang Zhiyuan

Zhang Hui

Yang Guangnan

Cristian Raduta

Jin Ningning

Beijing Contemporary Art Fair 2021

2021.10.13 - 2021.10.17

Booth 1.24

Hall 1&3, National Agricultural Exhibition Center, Beijing

 
Participating Artists：

Zhang Miao

Henk Visch

Wu Di

Zhang Shujian

Zhang Hui

Cristian Raduta

Yang Guangnan

Zhang Hui

Henk Visch

Wu Di

Zhang Shujian

Cristian Raduta

Xue Ruozhe

Fan Xi

Nabuqi

Monet’s Garden Phase One — a solo project by Yang Guangnan

During the decade between the 1990s and the 2000s, my hometown, a small city, saw a frenzied trend of copying the Western style of life. When the city leadership came up with the slogan of building the small city into a “Monet Garden”, people most probably did not even know who Monet was, but they did get a sense of prestige associated with everything foreign. It seemed to them a bit of imitation was just enough for renewing the spirit of the city. Later I learned this trend had swept the whole country, which accounted for the countless Monet gardens, Rome Cities, Central Park Quarters… It is a long list. Standing inside these residential housing projects or simply from the perspective of an on-looker, we are bewildered by the manifold of mis-matched cultures and identities, as well as the awkwardness and predicament accompanying the developing process. In the end, these urban plans and developments under prestigious foreign names show without exception a hollow spectacle along with the loss of orientation for the future.

For this Basel exhibition, four pieces of steel tubes (3x3cm), frame the center wall. The black steel frame is a spatial concept, resembling a giant picture frame, but content-wise one could only see an empty yet congested wall. Contrasting physically in front of the frame, the unmistakable patterns from a generic resin tile path, commonly seen in the recent residential complexes in China, are reshaped in the form of a large garden stone. The flat resin works on the two walls on either side are like Flower Windows, or rather like time portals, sealed and solidified. 

The installation lays out a failed vision and predicament founded on the blueprint of modern lifestyle and the infinite chroma of Impressionism. I want to show the ruins of urban development, the stumbles of seeking from the West a model of progression. This is why every work in the project deliberately used the method of casting, an ancient invention for making copies. 

To be sure, there is almost no representation of the national or the ideological in Zhang Shujian’s realist paintings; representation as such is, according to the artist, largely irrelevant. Described exactly ten years ago by writer Sabine Wang on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition as a dissenter who treats portraits chiefly as self-portraits, Zhang, born in Hunan in 1987, creates paintings that deal less with themes that are political or social in nature, and have been in the past years focusing on depicting isolated faces, densely textured and heavily physicalized - yet seemingly emerging from thin air. Inwardness and internalizations, presented as exactly the forth-coming of visage and externalizing trajectories: the paintings are free and independent from grand narratives, literariness, socio-political conditions, and, to borrow from Slavoj Žižek, a false sense of urgency that pertain directly to recent political or social events.

So much so that, Zhang Shujian’s oeuvre may disappoint those who are in search of the zeitgeist - if a Chinese zeitgeist today still indeed means something irrevocably and miserably political. Taken as a whole, Zhang’s practise since or even before graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 2010, has been marked by, among other prominent features, an anachronism. In 2013, after having worked upon realist painting for already more than a decade, Zhang started a series of studies after European masters: from Dürer’s mother (Skin Weave 1, 2013), Hans Balding Grien’s Head of Saturn (Skin Weave 2, 2013), to a Michelangelo, a Da Vinci and a Matthias Grünewald - as the title of the series suggests, Zhang effectively constructs these wood panel works upon the masters’ meticulous drawings, by enfleshing them, weaving the sitters’ skins, rendering them, one may exclaim, more appalling and deadly than ever.

Revisiting the Renaissance masters is not in itself an anachronistic act per se, given also that the masters have exerted immense influence on generations of Chinese artists, even to this day. Defying the idea of being or becoming contemporary or even chronologically coherent, however, is the fact that Zhang Shujian also complements these by exploring and interpreting in the same fashion a Kollwitz, and a portrait of a Ming Dynasty official (which recalls, surely, a totally different yet no less profound art history). Acknowledging that, the series prior to the Skin Weave is a group of extreme close-ups of everyday yet idiosyncratic and eerie faces depicted chiefly in a photorealist fashion, charged with a strange eventfulness as the artist admittedly works on them “obsessively and compulsively”, paying attention to every single detail, and the series to follow the Skin Weave somehow abruptly summons Oswald Spengler’s notion of the fellaheen (and this is where briefly and somehow esoterically a certain ideological, national, ethnic, racial, social or cultural element, a certain double representation - artistic and political at once - appears in Zhang’s practise so far), further followed by, most recently, paintings of group scenes, it should become clear that Zhang’s direction is far from being simply linear. In passing, although the differences between Zhang’s art and Manet’s are patently innumerable, one is to be reminded of what Bataille has to say about the latter, regarding his treatment of details: “In it [The Execution of Maximilian] Manet paid scrupulous attention to detail, but even this is negative, and the picture as a whole is the negation of eloquence; it is the negation of that kind of painting which, like language, expresses sentiments and relates anecdotes.” Analogously, Zhang is more interested in losing himself (again, obsessively, compulsively) in the details - the crossed, tangled hair, the wrinkled, pleated skins, and the eyes that are just as substantial, or, for important reasons yet to be fully clarified, less pertinent and deliberately cut out at times. Unlike the then prevailing genre of eloquent painting, Bataille discovers in Manet’s art an indifference regarding the death of the subject, and this goes hand in hand with his attention to details, however trivial. Théophile Thoré, on the same Manet: "...a sort of pantheism which places no higher value on a head than a slipper..., which paints everything almost uniformly.” It is perhaps too early to decide whether Zhang Shujian is likewise indifferent regarding his intimate, strange or historical subjects, but one can indeed testify to his pantheism that is no less egalitarian.

And death of the subject does concern Zhang Shujian in a way that is more than complex. Although he did not use the word “mask,” Zhang once spoke of a number of his early works on paper - including the meticulously realist Black No.9 (2012) and Black No.10(2013) in which the face of the same subject is covered fully by long, dark, meticulously depicted hair - as deliberately concealing the face, attempting to resist the order and tradition of the portraiture genre. One is to suspect that this economy of the face, the dialectic of the absence/presence of the face draws one major trajectory for the works to follow. Take again the Skin Weave for example: one can then depart from the apparent and simply justified reading of the series as opening a Western-Eastern or traditional-contemporary dialogue, and ponder the psychoanalytic significance of such a “skin weaving” or, indeed, masquerading attempt. The monochrome, bleak, skeleton-like and critical drawings that represent well-established yet somehow private achievements of the masters are here masked, and we should only avoid such naive reading: after being masked, after the veil that is Zhang’s endeavour, the faces are still who they are, are still identical to themselves, as if the young artist’s practise attempt to restore what was not there in the first place. By becoming seemingly organic and natural parts of the subjects, not only do the various masks, the apparently thin and ephemeral layers - hair, skins, freckles, pleats, even glasses, or even the very phallic image of the artist’s own neck, in his self-portrait - conceal the subjects’ interiority, change something in and of the subjects, rendering them no longer who they are; they also in a peculiar and uncanny way announce death, as death masks. Feigning, death: here, dead perhaps are not the sitters per se; after all, death in reality is here largely irrelevant an event. More powerful and pertinent, is the announced or indeed injuncted death that marked fully the relationship between the painter and the painted subject that ushers in, willingly or not, reconciliations and oblivion. Through this death, one gets to understand more Zhang’s practise in relation to his long-term veneration of Matthias Grünewald’s depiction of crucifixion.

If indeed Zhang Shujian’s art in the last decade has been chiefly marked by a certain indifferent passion regarding the interiority of the subject as we have suspected, although the images seem partial and cropped, faces and features singled out and isolated, we get to see a hint of the total, utterly un-fragmented state in which Zhang’s art is caught, in his most recent works of group scenes. Based upon existing images as usual (in the most cases, photographs taken by the artist himself), these paintings are not to be satisfied with what the specific, fleeting perspectives of the photos have to offer, and yet again restlessly indulge themselves in de-fragmenting the scenes, by filling the gaps and offering imagined details that are realist in style and in essence. One perhaps is to look forward to a further radicalisation of the movements of the mask - the fine layer between the real and the represented, between the living and the dead - passed as the face.

Guangzhou Contemporary Art Fair 2020 Booth B18

12/16 2020 – 12/20 2020

Guangzhou Haixinsha Convention Center

Participating Artists:

Chen Ke

Cristian Raduta

Henk Visch

Lao Jiahui

Nabuqi

Wang Zhiyuan

Wu Di

Yang Guangnan

Zhang Hui

Zhang Shujian

The Seventh West Bund Art & Design Fair, Booth A207

11/11/2020 – 11/15/2020
West Bund Art Center, 2555 Long Teng Ave. Xuhui District, Shanghai

Participating Artists：

Nabuqi

Wu Di

Yang Guangnan

Jin Ningning

Wang Zhiyuan

Zhang Hui

Zhang Miao

Zhang Shujian 

Cristian Raduta

Nanjing Yangzi Contemporary Art Fair 2020, Booth A34

10/15/2020 - 10/18/2020

Nanjing Internation Convention Center, Nanjing

Participating Artists：

Wu Di

Nabuqi

Zhang Miao

Zhang Shujian

Henk Visch

Wang Zhiyuan

He Wei

Pan Lin

Luan Xueyan

Zhang Hui

opening: Friday, 25 October 2019, 18.00 – 20.00

exhibition open: 25.10 – 26.11.2019

Fr-Sa: 13:00 - 18:00

Su-Th: by appointment

Sandwich

Jin Ningning converts Sandwich into an elaborate system whose shutter can be any visitor, through their weight but also their courage to take a creative leap – for real. He is aware that not many will take this leap. In any case, the public is here not just an active participant, but becomes the actual reason for which some works will exist and others won't.

The two spaces, inside and outside, are fully co-dependent: nothing is made in Chocolat if there is no action in Sandwich. At the same time, nothing gets destroyed inside if the destruction is not commanded from outdoors. The system has the capacity to paint, seemingly without the intervention of the artist. Ningning only builds the complex apparatus, the levers and connections between activator and pigment, while the final creative gesture remains mechanical, yet not random.

Glitter, ink, resin, plastic bottles, pierced t-shirts, inflatable figures, electric motors. Beyond the variety of elements of which Ningning's system is made of, the device relies on a simple decision: to leap into the void or not.