Yallay Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Vapor and Dust, a dual show of two promising Chinese young artists of the new generation, Su Wenxiang and Xu Qu. The exhibition will feature their latest paintings, video, photography and sculpture.
Su Wenxiang (b. 1979) works in the fields of video, filmed performance, installation, and soundtrack, exploring the limits of technology. In this exhibition, Su focuses on the issue of air pollution in China, and his contemplation on the essence of painting, by the tactic he uses to create different greys.
Beijing’s Fog is a silent film with no narrative and no leading role. The suffusing of the fog blurred the perspective and smoothed the solid, and the city was wreathed in fog, ultimately became a two dimensional canvas where all the citizens are living in. In another work entitled American Fog, which includes two photos of water mist from the Niagara Falls and the rainbow caused by the mist and the refracted sunlight, some souvenirs and one video which records the strong fog from a boat at the most adventurous spot downside the waterfalls, Su presented a similar scene yet of different contents, in contrast with the Beijing’s Fog.
In his work Canvas of “Gray Series”, Su creates his own “masterpieces”. “I am influenced by masterpiece all the time, but meanwhile I am obstructed by masterpiece all the time and even more I cannot put pen on paper.“ said the artist. He mixes several selections of pigments that used in the works of the “Old Masters”, pours them on top of the canvas and scrapes the surface with drawing knife. He thus erases the brushes to reduce painting to its essence. Each pigment that used for the paintings became the “media” of them.
Another work in the same series, Backing Finish, Su expunges the traces of artificial further. He adopts the symbolic color of greys that used exclusively by some luxury car brands, such as Havana Gray of BMW, Eagle Gray of AUDI, Black Copper Gray of BENZ, and Space Gray of Porsche, which bears different cultural aspirations and connotation into his painting. Therefore, like what the artist said, “it becomes more possible to create an outstanding painting or say a masterpiece without any artificial traces.”
The essence of the works of Xu Qu (b. 1978) is the destruction of the structures and appearances deeply rooted in our mind. The artist attempts to provoke a different way of thinking through a new visual presentation of materials, providing the audience a different power to observe and think.
In Xu Qu’s Laocoon, the artist employs a soft and shiny bronze material to reinvent the language of sculpture, reminding us that all that is seemingly indestructible and eternal is in fact tender and vulnerable as well, despite its shiny and sturdy appearance. This bronze linear installation echoes the artist’s work 0.618 from 2014 in which he incorporates the Golden Ratio. As the artist says, the sensitivity of mathematics is present at this moment.
Alongside, the artist presents an iconic series titled The Currency Wars. Obtained by enlarging banknotes watermarks these abstract and enigmatic paintings are a poignant commentary on the system of art collecting. The ultimate goal of the artist is to examine the ultimate target of anthropic aesthetics, and what kind of values and thoughts that the confrontation or mixture of different aesthetic experiences would bring us in different eras.
