Spectrumfigures: John Young Zerunge

10 Chancery Lane Gallery is proud to present Hong Kong born, Australian artist John Young in Spectrumfigures from April 23rd-May 29, 2021.

 

This Spring in Hong Kong and during Art Basel HK 2021, John Young will be exhibiting a group of abstract paintings entitled Spectumfigures, as well as a small group of works he created thirteen years ago — 1967 Dispersion; a recollection of the 1967 riots in Hong Kong, the time he departed the then British colony.

 

Spectrumfigures, a series of spectrum-based coloured abstracts that celebrate the evolution of consciousness in the younger generation of Hong Kongers of the twenty-first century. The dispersion of radiant light through a prism produces a plurality of colours that mark this generation as a spirited generation of many qualities.

 

The Spectrumfigures are produced by a unique process whereby Young downloads a thousand photographic images from the internet daily, algorithms transform these photographic images into abstract images - one will then be chosen from the thousand, and caringly painted up through jurassic but intricate oil painting techniques. It is what Young terms ‘Human-Technology Friendship’ paintings, a hope for the reciprocity between the cerebral strength of technology and the viscerality evoked by oil painting. This ironic title is derived from the name of a German electro-punk band in the 80’s Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (or German-American Friendship).

 

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.

 

His works have been shown in major exhibitions both in Australia and abroad, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He has devoted a large part of his four-decade career towards regional development in Asia, and has participated in many regional group travelling exhibitions including Asialink’s Art from Australia: Eight Contemporary Views, (1991, South East Asian Museums), Transcultural Painting (1994-5, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong), AGWA’s Confess and Conceal (1993, all South East Asian Museums), as well as Systems End (1996, Japan and Korea) and The Rose Crossing (1999-2001, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia). He was also seminal in establishing in 1995 the Asian Australian Artists’ Association (Gallery 4A), now the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, a centre for the promotion of Asian philanthropy and the nurturing of Australasian artists and curators. Young has regular solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, Australia, and also shows in Berlin, Beijing and Hong Kong.