Tag: Wang Yuyang

ArtSlant: Painting Lessons

Painting Lesson III: Elementary and Extreme Structure (curated by Bao Dong)

Gallery Yang, 798 Art District, Beijing, China

8 June – 7 July, 2013

Wang Yuyang

For the past two years Gallery Yang has hosted a series of exhibitions curated by Bao Dong, which he has titled Painting Lessons. In these Bao Dong has presented certain discrete aspects of the nature of current art production in China. In terms of format, the title places the emphasis on painting, but the results in the gallery spaces expand on this to include sculpture and installation.

The “lessons” that the curator proposes in this series aim to “go back to specific issues of painting,” divesting the artwork of its specific context as a way of understanding the piece. For Painting Lessons, Bao Dong suggests there has been an over-emphasised on context in contemporary art production, and (at least in these shows) he advocates a return to “various mediums and types” of artworks. In this way he claims: “we can more clearly understand the meaning and value of painting as it is.”

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ArtSlant: Rupture of Form and Meaning

Liner – Wang Yuyang solo show

Tang Contemporary, 798 Art District, Beijing

23 March – 30 April, 2013

Wang Yuyang’s set of disparate sculptural constructions that make up “Liner,” at Tang Contemporary, betray their design by computer in their fantastically ornate, mathematical shapes, spurs and swoops of material. They seem to express an aesthetic typically seen in the virtual shapes produced by CAD software. In the gallery they become slightly unreal or impractical forms: large cubes of marble are juxtaposed with jointed lengths of the same material, inserted with lengths of gleaming aluminium sheets; jagged wooden elements iterate and displace, their interlockings and overlappings forming a complex circular construction on the wall; a saddle-like construction is made up of multiple curved layers of hundreds of different materials proceeding in waves around the shape. A series of paintings accompany these sculptures, which seem to have been formulated by the same process, but when reduced to the flat surface of the canvas these works lose the “presence” in space that the sculptures effectively express.

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ArtSlant: Photography’s Phantom

La Chambre Claire: Liu Chuang, Liu Wei, Wang Yuyang, Zhang Liaoyuan, Zheng Guogu, curated by Tang Xin, Su Wenxiang, Xu Chongbao

Taikang Space, Red No.1-B2, Caochangdi, Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing, China

7 April – 2 June, 2012

Zhang Liaoyuan, A4 and A4 and A4 2012

With an abrupt reference in its title to a book by Roland Barthes (which appeared in English as Camera Lucida), this show gets underway, presenting works by five Chinese artists with a relation to the “phantom” of photography.

The artists’ particular approaches to the medium of photography are varied. In this show Liu Wei is the only artist to include actual photographs, with several examples from his series As Long As I See It, from 2006 on display. These works demonstrate a certain instrumentality by the artist, as he takes a Polaroid of an object and then proceeds to cut away parts of the original object to match the view presented in the photograph, presenting them both together in some kind of cause and effect relationship.

Liu Wei’s view of photography as a process forming the world in its image is the most straightforward use of the photographic medium in this show. The other works in the show proceed from the fact of photography to step away from the object of the photograph into terrain that addresses the meaning of this thing that is called photography.

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ArtSlant: Dialogue with History

Image History Existence – Taikang Life 15th Anniversary Art Collection Exhibition

National Art Museum of China, 1 Wusi Dajie, East District, 100010 Beijing, China

20 August – 7 September, 2011

 

It’s not often I get excited about the significance of an exhibition, and while Image History Existence is not perfect, I believe it is an important show in the issues it brings to play and in the constructive fashion with which it deals with them.

This survey show celebrates the 15th anniversary of the art collection of Taikang Life, one of China’s top insurance firms, founded by Chen Dongsheng (previously founder of China Guardian Auctions). Chen has put together a rather remarkable collection of artworks, covering a broad range of periods in Chinese modern and contemporary production.

This exhibition is straight-forwardly divided into three semi-chronological sections: “Revolution and Enlightenment,” covering the early period of China’s modern history from 1942 until 1989, this period symbolically ending with artist Xiao Lu’s controversial installation Dialogue (more on which below); “Pluralist Patterns,” which addresses the ’85 New Wave movement and its aftermath up to the present day; and, “Extended Vision,” which marks a shift in methodology from collecting existing work, to commissioning new works from emerging artists through the 51m2 Project Space, part of the organisation’s non-profit Taikang Space.

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