THEME: ABSTRACT
Chen Shijun's distinctive painting style mediates between digital and physical images. The Online Encyclopedia series, for example, takes prosaic images found while browsing online as its source material, and then interprets it through through heavy texturing and a nostalgic palette, converting the raw digital image into a final product with an exceptional sense of physicality. Online Encyclopedia: Daydream, takes an image of late afternoon sun, refracted through a myriad of window panes, as its subject. The painting has a dreamy, nostalgic effect, the sunlight lost in plays of light and shadow just as the mind escapes into absent-minded thought.
Click on the artwork for more information-
$35.00
So abstracted is this painting that it is only its title that hints at its original source: The Experience of Reading Vision: Basin No. 11, suggesting that the canvas of light and dark blues depicts a common, every day object, a trough that collects rainwater. Yet how did an image of a phyiscal, tangible, identifiable object become duo-toned abstraction? In order to create the effect, Wang Chunli Select images from daily life, and take pictures for them. The process is an act of reduction, of creating visually manifested difference between the original and its facsimile. Wang Chunli then paints the image that results, a means of both reconstructing the image and tracing preserving the emotional qualities of its degenerative.
Click on the artwork for more information-
$35.00
The youthful figures from Exponential Repetitions of Visual Readings: Play by Wang Chunli, are nostalgic and almost ghost-like, their forms barely fleshed out in a palette of blue, brown, and beige. Wang Chunli's painting technique is heavily mediated by the act of facsimile, making physical and digital copies of images until they are reduced to their essence. His painting style evokes the quality of memory; shapes shift and shimmer in an ether tempered by blue melancholy. The subjects are indistinct, as are the specifics of their presence, and it is perhaps the emotional tones of the painting that register most clearly.
Click on the artwork for more information-
$35.00
Chen Jiao's Dali depicts the characters for the Chinese city in southwest Yunnan province. It takes a moment to read the characters—the second character is positioned backwards—and they stand out more for their bold form and rich texture than their content, an effect achieved through layering colors and a variety of materials, such as paper, paint, chalk, and blackboard. Chen's use of signage is abstract even as her manipulation of medium creates a very specific effect—Dali has a quality of urban vibrancy about its embrace of the material, allowing a two-dimensional surface to invoke a myriad of social connotations, opening up the abstracted work to many possibilities.
Click on the artwork for more information-
$35.00
Chen Jiao's November 7th is named after a date, but features an industrial building, sketched lightly against a square grid. More than the building itself, its form stands out against the blank background, with perspective points and the foreground's boundary clearly visible. Against the front building's side, a slogan is available: “safe production,” painted in bold red characters. The final two characters are each drawn backwards, giving a clue that this is image is not actually meant to be a precise rendering of an actual structure. The markings of light color washes are visible in the background, and the work is dotted with Chen's calculations, leaving building measurements and calculations visible. But Chen is no architect. Trained in oil paiting at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute, Chen leaves the calculations visible as a means of voicing the utility and design that goes into the sketch, asking which meanings remain when the building is described in only its signs.
Click on the artwork for more information-
$35.00
2009-06 is part of a larger series inspired by Zheng’s reflections on desire. In this piece, he pushes the boundaries between abstract expressionism and formalism. At the center of the composition a vaguely human form with outstretched arms divides the black background into four quadrants. This figure is composed, or perhaps engulfed, by colorful, feathery brushwork. These undulating, near-translucent swirls of light and color have a flame-like quality, and seem to rise through the composition. In the black background, bright sparks of of color stream by diagonally. The overall effect is elegant yet ambiguous. Like much of Zheng’s work, this painting communicates a sense of transience. Perhaps the flames are consuming the figure, and its beauty is merely a byproduct of this destruction. Alternatively, it might simply be a coalescence of light and energy in space.
Click on the artwork for more information-
$35.00
