Plural

Artist: Zhang Xuerui, Guo Mengyao, Chen Yufan, Chi Qun, Chen Ruo Bing, Qian Jiahua, Ju ting

It is a great honor to present you the first exhibition of Ginkgo Space relocate into 798 Art District—Plural. These polyptychs paintings, created by Chen Ruo Bing, Chen Yufan, Chi Qun, Guo Mengyao, Ju Ting, Liu Wentao, Qian Jiahua, and Zhang Xuerui, are shown in a new visual style. The exhibition will be held on October 20th, until November 26th, 2016.

An increasing number of things are considered in the context of deepening globalization today, let alone arts, which rrepresents fresh thought and culture. Thus far, the growth and development of Western Modern Art has long been beyond the pure fine arts (history), which integrated into a complex practice of combination of aesthetics, culture, history, even politics. The changes brought by growing-up has generally and deeply influenced numerous “latecomers”, made them seeking reflection and renovation from “Modernity” and “Modernism”, so to fill in the gaps in their art history and ideology. Nevertheless, due to many history factors, those efforts are immersed in eddy of filling and surpassing. They are eager to find the target location in order to win some legitimacy. For instance, summarizing some non-figurative features of traditional painting into kind of pre-modern expressionist painting, or using “abstract expressionism” and its theory to establish their own image mechanism (Actually, western artists are doing something similar). Unfortunately, however, such intercultural “chance meeting” often ends up with surface imitating, while ignoring the fact which described by Ruth Benedict, the American Scholar, “Culture is different, more because they have adapted as a whole in different directions. They are pursuing different goals, with different ways. The goals and means in one society can not be judged in accordance with thing in another society, because they are essentially incomparable.” In other words, art, idea, knowledge, custom, belief and the tradition who contents them, never appeared in singular. Whether in different contexts (like the East and West, different nations, different schools), or in the same cultural context, we should be fully aware of the PLURAL inside, from a more complex and more rich level. On the other side, art is the representation of thought and culture. Just because of this, art provides us an opportunity to self-examination.

Paintings created by these eight artists, shown in this exhibition, are presented in the plural form. “Work-Work”, “Author-Work” and “Author-Author” has entered into a dual relation. Governed by these three relations, the exhibition constitutes a vast array, surrounding with art type, art language, idea, skill and author’s experience. Each problems will turn into a sort of sample of rhetoric to express in succession. They are similar, or suitable, or reciprocal, or relative, to induce us pursue the inside similarity measurement or dramatic conflict beyond initial appearance.

From the intuitively point of view, the works of the eight artists have rendered a non-figurative language, but the non-figurative here is not a style of “abstract painting” or “expressionism”. On the contrary, it is worthy of our precaution and reflection to make decisions by virtue of style and pattern. Meanwhile, it is exactly what the exhibition want to convey, that how should we accomplish the contemplation of “way of seeing”? It is no doubt necessary to bring up again Greenberg’s argument for “abstraction”—that emerges in modern art is the result of the artist's own natural selection promoted by art history itself, not the product declared subjectively by artists like “I wanna pursue abstract”. But for a long time, the latter is the usual way we look at certain types of art. Therefore, We hope to adopt such an attitude to review the works presented by this exhibition. That is, under the seemingly convergent artistic face, in the form of “joint”, to give some indication of self-sufficiency value about each group mentioned above and to explore the relationship among each (group) works like tangling, kinking, contradicting, and breeding. It also shows that our way of seeing needs to re-launch and extrapolate from this.

So-called Plural, is not only to take sides, but also a kind of “rule”, a methodology of metaphor. It provides all visible or invisible associations without focus, distinction and allocation, which underlie in the works, author (experience), skill, color, objective image, make them meet viewers accidentally. Starting from the form, it has balanced the mono basic worldview and narrative way hided in single works, one the other hand it has added a frame of reference in the form of plural, embedded the opportunity to contrast and self-attesting between up and down, back and forth, left and right, cause and effect, positive and negative, to shock those inherent bias and dualistic mind, finally back to a real way of seeing—beyond any realistic and utility purposes, and not be fettered by the name of exploring the aesthetics, art and knowledge.

—Lyu Hao