Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2018: Wang Keping, Gu Benchi, Huang Rui, John Young, Zhang Xuerui

 

Born in Beijing, 1952

Huang Rui is one of China’s most highly regarded artists and one of the pivotal protagonists of the first non-conformist art groups to emerge from China in 1979. The Stars (Xing Xing 星星), established in the late 70s following the end of the Cultural Revolution, used art to promote social ideologies and initiated some of the first free art expressions in the Post-Mao era. Huang Rui’s important Space Structure painting series produced in Beijing (1979-1984) is recognised as being the first series of abstract oil on canvas of its kind to come out of China, a radical artistic position. As a leader of The Stars (Xing Xing 星星) and exhibition, Huang Rui was fundamental in the art movement that brought together like-minded artists such as, Wang Keping, Ma Desheng and Ai Wei Wei. This groundbreaking group of amateur artists was the first publicly active art collective to protest government censorship after the Cultural Revolution. Before his involvement in this group, Huang was one of the founders of the underground literature and poetry magazine, Today, with Bei Dao and Mang Ke. Poetry was a way to express themselves when expression in the form of painting was unavailable. Huang Rui is an artist that has at once the ability to combine extreme intellect with a highly sensitive and personal approach. His works are finely crafted and meticulously finished. Within a minimalist exterior there hides mountains of meanings and connotations stemming from ancient Chinese philosophy, modern- day communist hypocrisy or current society’s middling obsessions.

 

Presented here are his works “Four Purples” that explore visually the Chinese idioms using the word purple. Huang Rui has used text within his works since the 1980s to express the irony of communist slogans or perhaps referencing literature and sayings. The colour series is expressing almost sculpturally the minimal beauty of the characters that are steeped in meaning.

 

Born in Beijing, 1949

Wang Keping, along with Huang Rui, is also one of the founders of the non-conformist artist group The Stars (Xing Xing 星星), formed in 1979 during the post-Cultural Revolution “Beijing Spring.” This group of young avant-garde artists challenged the status quo and were pivotal in initiating some of the first free art expressions in the Post-Mao era.

 

Wang Keping moved to France in 1984 and is regarded as both one of China’s foremost sculptors as well as France’s where he was knighted with the honour of Chevalier dans l’Odre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015. Wang Keping’s sculptures are an exploration of the human form. With a natural intuition of space and balance, they convey representations of women, men, couples in embrace, mother and child, birds as well as his Ex-Voto forms. His process begins with the wood and what it has to give. Using hard woods from France, they each give different characteristic to bring out a certain humanity expressed in different pieces. Wang Keping reveals the natural contours of the wood: the grain; knots; and flaws to evoke figurative representations in his work that are implicit, implied or suggest. Inspired in his early years by masters of European Modernist sculpture, he has found his sculptural voice by letting the wood speak and he as the collaborative partner finding its form. As the late Michael Sullivan, Professor at Oxford and Author of Art and Artists of 20th Century China put it so eloquently, “We should leave Wang Keping’s work to speak for itself. The meaning is in the form. And what form! If, as I believe, what has been called the “inner core” of art is the way in which the artist transforms feeling into form then we can see that mysterious process taking place before our eyes with Wang Keping’s passionate engagement with a chunk of wood.”

 

Born in Hong Kong, 1956

John Young Zerunge was born in Hong Kong in 1956 and moved to Australia in 1967. He read philosophy of science and aesthetics at the University of Sydney and then studied painting and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts, specifically with the conceptual artist Imants Tillers and musical prodigy (the late) David Ahern. His investigation of Western late modernism prompted significant phases of work from a bi-cultural viewpoint, including series of paintings in the last four decades – the Silhouette Paintings, The Polychrome Paintings, the Double Ground Paintings and the Abstract Paintings.

Propositions for the Polychrome Paintings (1989) John Young
1. These paintings aim to clarify my world, my present and in that sense, they do not cite nor say.

2. The choices of colours and their relation are intuitive, and sometimes by chance.

3. There are irregularities, anomalies, mistakes in these paintings; such as the coarse surface, the precarious lines, blotches of colour - all these anomalies are what may be called unconscious unique gestures in the work.

4. These works exists somewhere between the eye, brain, and what it may remind you or I of. So, it is somewhere between the optic, the concept, and memory.

5. In general, more than one person executes these works. They are a relation based on love, and the spirit for art and between artists. In that sense, these works manifest a passion.

6. The literal titles to these works, such as “Sanctuary”, “The Sacred Season”, “Fruit (Happiness)”, exorcise the sanctity of this passionate relation between artists, and turns your interpretation of this relation into banal kitsch. In that sense, they are emotionally exclusive and rejective of the viewers (including the artists involved), once the work is finished.

7. The aims of these works are a sense of wonder for art, a sense of guilt of the impossibility of repeating the same unique relation from one work to the next between the artists involved, and following a set of pre-determined rules of how to proceed with these paintings which gives me a safe sense or passage.

 

 

Born in Shanghai, 1979

“Rhythm is the essence.”— Gu Benchi is dedicated to record and simulate the determining elements within sophisticated media with simplified palette. Before the idea of modern integrated media art was created, oeuvres created with special materials and methods were mingled with traditional genres. However, as the vocabulary of artistic expressions is rapidly enlarged nowadays, artists have realized the importance of creation process and media. In animated movie scenes, flowing melodies, and even in static two-dimensional paintings, the depicted scenes and the methods of presentation formulate a sense of rhythm, which is further accentuated by palpable emotions – such as dignity, gentleness, elegance and grief – expressed in the works. In other words, it is the perceptual experiences that are transformed into a visual tempo through the modulation of the media, not the other way around. Seeking a way to simplify the abovementioned process, Gu Benchi adopts polyester yarn as the principle material and weaves them into exquisite patterns. Since the raw materials are extremely accessible and the crafting process is easy to master, Gu has saved a lot time that could have been spent on the research of new media. Not simply obsessed with the hand-crafting process, he is in fact determined to find out implications of complicated problems. Such ambition is comparable to that of John Milton Cage’s, who devoted himself to exploring the vibration of one single note by hitting the same key repetitively. As sensible as Cage once was, Gu reveals to us the impact of form and media on the artworks’ rhythm, as if a craftsman pursuing precision and perfection.

 

 

Born in Shanxi Province, 1979

Composed of grids of gradient colours, Zhang Xuerui’s paintings embrace a dual construction of both the metaphysical and the concrete. The external characteristics of her work seem to have a fundamental flavour of cool abstraction. Nevertheless, her repetitive, grid-by-grid approach carried out through physical endeavour, and the uncertainty and contingency stemming from her personal experience and factors of sensitivity, altogether demonstrate connotations transcendent of pure form. The rich messages revealed by her individualised formal language and methodologies provide further undertones to the foundation of Zhang’s work, which extend to her cultural identity. A complex and meticulous system is constructed from complementary resonances between the part and the whole, universality and particularity, as well as the form and the idea.

A graduate of the architecture department of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Zhang is masterly in terms of the constructive process from scratch, and the interdependent relationship between elements within a structure, the architectural background entails subliminal influences on her artistic concepts and methodologies.

 

Prior to the first brushstroke, Zhang sets the fundamental tone of the canvas, and samples the temporal direction and degrees of the gradual process with smaller sketches. The piece originates with pre-set colours at three corners of the canvas. During the coherent, inter-locked colouring process, meticulous shading of tones progressively blend the lattices, evolving and congregating into a “spectrum” on the face of the blank canvas. A purely visual space, detached from specific, identifiable objects, is thus fostered.