ZHANG Zhenyu
DUST II
9 April – 13 May 2016
Opening Reception
Saturday 9 April, 3-6pm
DUST II
9 April – 13 May 2016
Opening Reception
Saturday 9 April, 3-6pm
An innovating artist whose work challenges our perceptions of materiality and artistic production, Zhang Zhenyu transforms China’s particle-laden air into delicately polished paintings in his ongoing Dust series. The artist will be present for the opening reception on April 9, from 3-6pm. Zhang began using dust as the basis for his work in 2011, collecting it from across China during a period of rapid industrial development and urbanization. Varying natural conditions and manufacturing pollutants render dust in an array of hues—from white to gray to brown to black. Built up in layers using an adhesive, the works are later polished to a shimmering reflective surface. Once completed, they are indecipherable from the original medium: the smooth surfaces of minimalist circles and squares hint at a more complex medium, some with peripheries exposing separate shades of dust, others with entrancing smoke-like swirls. Less as a natural phenomena and industrial bi-product, Zhang’s dust is an elemental substance—a meta-form as he calls it—adopted as a medium to transform his views into simplified and abstracted features. The mirrorred surfaces of the finished works reflect the viewer’s image and signal a moment of contemplation. The meditative quality of Zhang’s work traces to his Reading series, begun in 2007, in which he used a needle to scratch out the text of the front page of the People’s Daily (the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party) every day from January 1st to December 31st of that year. The five-hour daily ritual extended in the subsequent years to the China Daily and Beijing Daily papers in a defiant act of information erasure. In a separate group of works he calls Copying, Zhang made newspaper pulp which was laid out in sheets, dried, and taking a knife etched the words of the original paper, illegible save the large characters of the masthead. |
Dust 160301, 2016
Mixed media, diameter 200 cm
Newspaper 130118, 2013
Mixed media, 55 x 80 cm |
In his catatlogue introduction to DUST II, renownded Chinese poet, curator and critic Zhu Zhu summarizes: “Paper, dust, and, smoke: all of these mediums are characterized by lightness, thinness and a proximity to formlessness. They are the invisible parts of the over bloated materialistic reality. But they also form the deepest mirror image. Especially in his Dust series, Zhang Zhenyu provides an artistic form that makes us stop and think deeply.”
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In his catatlogue introduction to DUST II, renownded Chinese poet, curator and critic Zhu Zhu summarizes: “Paper, dust, and, smoke: all of these mediums are characterized by lightness, thinness and a proximity to formlessness. They are the invisible parts of the over bloated materialistic reality. But they also form the deepest mirror image. Especially in his Dust series, Zhang Zhenyu provides an artistic form that makes us stop and think deeply.”
BACK