Exhibition
18th June 2022 – 14th August 2022 ( Due to Shanghai’s pandemic situation, please be advised that gallery is open by appointment only. To schedule a visit, please contact our WeChat official account @SGA沪申画廊。 )
Venue
SGA Three on the Bund, 3F, No.3 Zhong Shan Dong Yi Road, Shanghai
Artists
Li Wenguang, Liang Manqi, Ni Zhiqi, Shao Wenhuan, Shi Zhiying, Xuan Chenhao, Yang Xi, Zhen Wenxing
Curator
Wang Kaimei
▃
Space & Gallery Association (SGA) Shanghai is pleased to present Through A Glass and Darkly ––a group exhibition specially curated by independent curator Wang Kaimei. 8 artists: Li Wenguang, Liang Manqi, Ni Zhiqi, Shao Wenhuan, Shi Zhiying, Xuan Chenhao, Yang Xi, and Zhen Wenxing, whose practices range from painting, sculpture, and photography, are invited to generate an array of personal visual reflections on some of the key issues in art, life and society. After a long postponement, the much awaited exhibition is now on view from Saturday, 18th June through Sunday, 14th August 2022, at Three on the Bund, Shanghai.
As the title of the exhibition quoted from a theological text suggests, the mirror image of ourselves through the reflection in the others leads us to the way of knowing God better and clearer, similarly, the way of approaching to art. Applying glass reflection as a metaphor, 8 artists in this exhibition are projected into 4 pairs of concepts.
Under the concept Attitude and Form --featuring abstract works by artists Ni Zhiqi and Liang Manqi--we focus on Abstract Art's essential quest of searching for meaning in a figureless world. Ni Zhiqi's monochromic paintings contain layers of folding, shaping, collaging, and coloring of various materials. His process engages time, memory, and emotion and embodies his attitude towards art, life, living, and love. Liang Manqi’s abstract work deals with basic elements of painting--dots, lines, spheres--and the affective balance and imbalance which these constellations orchestrate upon the canvas. Her geometric patterns and designs generate an illusionary visual space that intrigues our cognitive perception and challenges our rationality.
Meanwhile, artists Xuan Chenhao and Zheng Wenxin approach painting with the same methodology as archeologists. They dig into their respective Natural and Social field. Xuan Chenhao's paintings always involve bright colors and multiple layers of textures. His paintbrush functions as a searchlight lit up the soil and curious vegetation growing from it. His enigmatic images release an inner logic of painting in which the artist firmly believes. The field that Zheng Wenxin digs is the endless data flow on the internet. Since 2017, Zheng has produced artworks based on her friends' social media content. The artist would randomly pick a moment from her friends' shared memories on Wechat to produce an image representing her information flow perspective. These multi-layered images on her paintings present a kaleidoscopic vision of our modern life where momentary satisfaction and anxiety steadily replace each other.
Both Shi Zhiying and Shao Wenhuan's art are into rocks, stones, waterfront, and seascape, but with different media and create different visions. Shi Zhiying leaves every brushstroke on canvases in the process of depicting natural objects. She crops a seascape within the endless waterbody forcing us to face her intuitional reaction to infinity and vastness of nature. Whilst the existence of the sea is tangible on her canvases, the interception of time and space in her paintings are not to be traced. Shi Zhiying's reflection on the real and the represented under the concept of Reality and Virtuality finds its reciprocation in Shao Wenhuan's 3D modeled photographs of mountains and water. Shao's photographs originate in his sketches of ancient Chinese landscape paintings but are deprived of their context and rendered with computer software. Both artists' works intricately reflect and duplicate each other's presence in a quest for the real and the virtual, the natural and the artificial.
The work of Yang Xi explores the otherness and in-betweenness represented by sculptures made of artificial and synthetic materials. Their otherworldly gestures seem to notify us of a dress rehearsal held for our inevitably doomed future. She allows intuition to lead the way of creating so that her synthetic sculptures engaging human and inhuman, mechanical and biotic actually grow organically in space. Under the concept of Biotic and Synthetic, artist Li Wenguang dives into the mythical world of mathematical formulas and the world of sci-fi. However, as an artist and an image-maker, his ambiguous pictures with fabricated narratives and make-to-believe plots provide first-hand dizzying aesthetic experiences. Together, Yang Xi and Li Wenguang's works resonate with our uncertainty towards the future.
French writer Romain Rolland once said the real meaning of art is to reveal the truth of the human condition, depict our hidden emotions, and embrace the world with passion. However, most of the artists' works are conducted in solitude, and they keep themselves in constant lonely struggle and self-negation. This exhibition offers an opportunity for artists to look at their art through the eyes of another colleague. They are each other's looking glass and mirror image; their works reflect in each other's creations--questioning and responding. Each artist provides an individual narrative that is uniquely his or hers, together they bring forceful insight on how we may look at the world through the lens of art. Their different initiatives reaccess the boundaries between art and technology, between past, present, and future, and between beholding tradition. In common presence, through a glass and darkly, they dare for newness
▃
About the artists
Liang Manqi (b. 1986 in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China)
Graduated from the department of Art Education from the School of Public Art at the China Academy of Art in 2009 and received her Master’s Degree from the department of Painting at Chinesisch-Deutshe Kunstakademie (CDK) in China Academy of Art, in 2012. She currently lives and works in Shanghai.
Liang Manqi’s work has been exhibited in major art museums, including Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing; chi K11 Museum of Art in Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Shanghai; Arario Gallery in Jeju, Korea; Westbund Art and Design Fair in Shanghai; Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture; and more. She was invited to numerous art project collaboration with leading brands and celebrities, including “Lady Dior As Seen By” exhibition; DS AUTOMOBILES Paris vehicle marque x Art collab; ““Mickey: The True Original & Ever Curious” Exhibition World Tour; Zhou Penchang’s “Lunar Phases” art exhibition, and etc.
Li Wenguang (b.1985, Shanghai, China)
Currently lives and works in Shanghai. The self-taught artist has gone through several stages of diversifying his visual language since he started his artistic journey in 2004. 8 years ago, Li developed a representative geometric pattern, one that he continues to evolve to this date.
Ni Zhiqi (b.1957, Shanghai, China)
Studied MFA at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium and won the first prize at the Karel Veslat Art Exhibition. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. Ni’s works have been widely collected and featured in exhibitions across Asia and Europe.
Shao Wenhuan (b.1971, Hotan Xinjiang)
Studied in the department of Mixed Media and Painting at the China Academy of Art in 2002 and continued his studies at the École National des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France. The artist primarily focuses on the study and experimental nature of photography as a medium. Shao currently lives in Hangzhou and is associate professor in the photography department at the China Academy of Art. His works are exhibited widely in China and abroad, including: China Academy of Art Museum, Hangzhou; Folkwang Museum, Germany; the First Biennial of Contemporary Art in Milan, Italy; Beijing Photography Biennial, Beijing; the Lucerne Art Museum, Lucerne, Switzerland, among others. His works are part of many private and public collections around the world, including the Uli Sigg collection.
Shi Zhiying (b.1979, Shanghai)
Received her MFA in Oil Painting from The Fine Arts College of Shanghai University in 2005. She is a first-class national artist and currently works at Shang-hai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute.
Her works are held in the public collections of: Power Station of Art, Shanghai; China Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai; Shanghai Fosun Foundation; CC Foundation; Yuz Museum Shanghai; Liu Haisu Art Museum; Orange County Mu-seum of Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Pizzuti Collection, etc.
Xuan Chenhao (b.1989, Shanghai, China)
Graduated from the East China Normal University College of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.
My paintings draw inspiration from the binary relationship between animals and plants living in the rainforest. Like an inward-blooming syconus that lures the wasp with its fleshy seeded stalks into its bud to breed, I attempt to convey this lively vigor that has propelled our genealogy and thoughts to evolve over the centuries through my art. The intention is less about creating; instead, it is an exertion to be freed after portraying these entities, the process rejects meaning, and the work fuels itself with menace and unsettledness. My memory weaves these animals, plants and symptoms of life together. The march toward creation never fails to be brutal. All organisms are naturally diverse in their mode of expression, with difference and sameness that vary in scale. Similar to the model-crafting process in simulation games, meaning endows its power within the parameters of its containment. As Paul W. Kahn once wrote in his discourse about the inseparable existence between individual and communal identity: “We create and maintain our personal identity in the very same process by which communal identity is created and maintained.”
Yang Xi (b.1988)
Graduated with MA from Goldsmiths, University of London. She currently lives and works in Shanghai. Yang has previously participated in Nottingham Art Festival, UK; London Art Festival, and more.
Yang Xi primarily focuses on sculpture; and is adept in capturing and summarizing abstract forms based on intuition. Her work is inspired by memories and emotions from personal behaviours or the slits of perception. Yang pays close attention to the developing ecology of objects and events created and evolved by human beings and nature. By re-imagining and re-defining history and ecology, as well as experiences accumulated in daily network and real life, she captures the potential scenes, forms, and materials from actual experiences, then collects, overlays, and reprocesses them into her re-contextualized sculptures. The artist eliminates the timeliness in sculptural language and imbues the medium with new generation logic and possibilities of re-ecology. Together, her work marks a search for a rational co-existence with space and a new effective mode of viewing.
Zheng Wenxin (b. 1975)
Received BA from the department of art at Xiamen University in 1997 and obtained her MA at Kent Institute of Art & Design, UK, in 2001. She taught at Xiamen University from 1997 to 1999. She currently lives in Hangzhou and teaches at China Academy of Art. Zheng Wenxin participated in artist residencies at Kent Institute of Art & Design, UK, from 2001-2003; and the PILOTENKUCHEN International Lepzig, Germany, in 2019.
▃
Gallery
Click here to download our exhibition media pack.