Dong Dawei: Fresh Nature

Dong Dawei’s second solo exhibition “Fresh Nature” will open on 14th June at Ginkgo Space (Shenzhen), featuring more than twenty landscape paintings in plaster.

How to understand “Shan Shui” in a contemporary context has been Dong Dawei’s longstanding artistic thinking and practice, and in his previous exhibitions “Landscape Portrait” and “Back to Qinglv”, he traced back the origins of Western landscape painting and Chinese landscape (shan shui) painting respectively. The artist believes that the “landscape (shan shui)” theme reflects how nature is represented in different cultures, which in turn reflects different worldviews. Painting, as a means of creating images, not only depicts the image of the world but is also part of the physical world. Especially at present, humanity has reached a turning point in the technology of image creation: images increasingly exist and are created in virtual form. The mission of painting has shifted from producing images to reflection on image creation: painting serves as an intermediary between the real world and virtual images, and it must strengthen its connection to reality by enhancing its materiality. 

Dong Dawei’s paintings consistently focus on the materiality of painting, such as the blurring of liquid colours or the falling and scattering of solid pigments. In this exhibition “Fresh Nature”, the artist draws inspiration from traditional Chinese landscape (shan shui) painting and Western frescoes while innovating contemporary landscape painting. He reconfigures ancient scenes of people travelling in the mountains into flat or distant diagrams read from a contemporary perspective, such as mountains, water, and clouds. Additionally, he innovatively combines the materiality of painting with natural themes, using the hydration reaction of plaster to permanently fix colours within it (similar to how frescoes preserve fresh colours). Compared to works created on canvas or paper, Dong Dawei’s new works not only create the image but also create the “wall surface”, further concretely deepening his concept of the materiality of painting: simultaneously creating painting as an image and painting as a material and object.