05.12.08
Art Exhibit: Red Blood of the Dragon’s Psyche
Salomon Arts
83 Leonard St, 4th Fl
New York, NY 10013
TEL 212.966.1997
www.salomonarts.com
RED BLOOD OF THE DRAGON’S PSYCHE
June 5 to Aug 5 2008
[artists]
Chen Nong, Zhang Han, Fu Yue Hui, Zhao Bo, Zhang Yu Ying
[curator]
Zhang Jie-Song
There is a substance more vital to our humanity than that which flows through our arteries, capillaries, and veins – it is the blood of our thoughts, senses, and feelings that not only pools within our minds but likewise spreads the entire surface of the world. It is this substance that hardens on canvas to manifest visual art.
If in fact we value art as a supreme language of our humanity, a vessel that reveals in an authenticity worthy of trembling this substance, this experience, of how we each feel in our grappling with the human experience, then we must work to show art in relation to the life from which it stems. In art exhibitions, the observer would not taste wine so much as the air and soil of the artists’ lives, that he or she may be brought nearer to the flesh and the earth from which the artwork emerges.
Red Blood of the Dragon’s Psyche, an exhibition series presented by Salomon Arts Gallery and curator Zhang Jie-Song, asserts the belief that if we wish to know and value Chinese art with sincerity, then we must learn to know and value China, Chinese people, Chinese thought. The work of 10 Chinese contemporary artists is to be presented throughout this exhibition series and arranged so as to highlight the dominant provinces that have defined the terrain of Chinese psychological experience within the lifespan of “Modern China”. Towards this end, the works of the artists will be presented alongside information on China in the form of news-stories, essays, and video projection intended to provide a constellation of social and historical points, by which the audience may navigate with greater insight the vast, deep, and roaring waters of Chinese psychological and (consequently) artistic thought. It is the placement of the artists’ ideas alongside a vision of their world.
The first exhibition in the Red Blood of the Dragon’s Psyche series opens on June 6th, 2008, and will feature the works of Chen Nong, Zhang Han, Fu Yue Hui, Zhao Bo, and Zhang Yu Ying.
Chen Nong’s photography submerges distinct Chinese imagery (both ancient and modern) within a world of flamboyant color, sexuality, and fearlessness of dream, a courageous yet culturally loyal and socially perceptive means of liberation from the conservative and orderly principles of the land and the times in which he was raised. The oil paintings of Zhang Yu Ying work similarly, casting strong traditional images – most notably, the farm animals revered in the folk and rural culture of the artist’s upbringing – into a fantasy theater that speaks of the old China now mingled with modern archetypes. In many of his works we see the artist concealing the mind and muscle-tearing motion of China’s feverish modernization behind smiling faces and the serenity of animals at play. In the case of both artists, their work embodies the process of Chinese traditional thought - aged, poised, and elegant - undergoing a re-painting and colorization process by way of the more liberal, perverse, and eccentric modern psychological energies.
These energies were introduced into China by the Western world, relatively recently, and Fu Yue Hui’s mixed-media works – which involve ink, newspaper, traditional Chinese art on paper, and propylene – investigate the affect of Western imagery and thinking on the Chinese mind, which he portrays as an oftentimes corrosive and difficult to define relationship. His works are as lab results, images of cultural mutation yielded in the reaction of Western and Chinese chemicals of sense and thought.
Zhao Bo’s woodcut works chisel often boisterous child-like figures on rocking horses alongside strong Chinese cultural imagery, offering us the choice to resolve all of the intensities associated with China’s recent political turbulence and head-pounding rate of cultural change beneath a pretense of innocence. Yet the nuances bound to his subject matter, in addition to the industrial method of his creating, speak powerfully of the underlying noise and circumstance of China’s modern identity.
The Chinese ink on paper works of Zhang Han take a directly different approach to Zhao Bo. His creations, though marked by a certain imaginative playfulness, tend to be highly intense and filled with elements of torture – of the nature known to compel the dark aspects of the Western curiosity in their fascination over serial-killers, crime, and the more perverse regions of the human behavior. Embellished by the forceful character of Chinese ink, his work is a raw account of the dissatisfied and deviant parts of China’s psychological character – especially that of its younger generations in search of spiritual meaning.