ART-PREVIEW:Points of Departure
While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of skepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning. Often mixing different artistic and popular styles and media, postmodernist art can also consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles from the past.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
The group exhibition “Points of Departure” features paintings three Chinese Artists: Gao Ludi, Lu Song, and Xie Nanxing. They offer 21st Century versions of the appropriation based processes pioneered by American artists during the 1980s. The exhibition brings these artists together in order to consider the evolution of painting and its complex relationship with source imagery. Social media today has become the most relevant channel through which the visual is produced and circulated. Intimacy is an essential attribute of the visual in its making, whether simulated or not. It not only resides within the confines of ritualistic sharing and exposing, but also renders itself physically and biologically – the visual departs from the realm of the aesthetics and permeates into the realm of the biological. Desires become necessities. Gao Ludi takes found images as his point of departure, appropriating the aesthetics in a playful, yet analytic fashion. The act of painting resembles to the artist the act of excretion in various aspects – repetitive, daily, mundane, ritualistic, rejecting being captured and recorded by historicist narratives, and always involving a certain element of excess. Lu Song works from photographs he has taken of the landscape. By layering and repeating the image over and over, the perspective becomes blurred and fluctuates between representation and abstraction. In his landscapes inspired by urban parks and green spaces, Lu Song also inserts imagery drawn from literature, films, and personal experiences to expose the human construction that dominates much of the outdoor spaces we experience. His paintings of leafy foliage exemplify his introspective look at spaces that exist within the border of the natural and manmade environment. Xie Nanxing creates highly expressive, small-scale oil sketches. He translates the painterly marks from these oil sketches onto large-scale canvases that obscure direct reference to their origins and yet retain a sense of having originated from a specific pre-existing image. This obfuscation of representational meaning underscores the artist’s approach to paintings as an investigation into the supposed objectivity of image making, choosing to focus on the mechanical functions of painting as distortion of reality itself.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Hong Kong, Duration: 20/7-9/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
