Following Nobuo TAKAMORI’s “Lost Garden” (Taipei), ESLITE GALLERY’s “Cross-Strait Young Artists Exhibition Program” is pleased to present “The Sociology of Oneself” (Beijing) curated by ZHU Zh. In the exhibition, ZHU Zhu seeks to show a fresh outlook and the exciting potential of young artists from mainland China with works by CHENG Ran, Qingtai HU, LI Qing, NI Youyu, YANG Xinguang, and ZANG Kunkun.

With his insightful discussion of contemporary art, ZHU Zhu has won himself the 2011 CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award) for Critics. “In the past social context, artists in mainland China used to fight against totalitarianism. Nowadays, individuals are tightly intertwined in the enormous web of power and capitalism, thus binary opposition no longer exists. ‘Anger’ gives way to ‘emptiness’, and ‘suffering’ gives way to ‘vapidity’...... As discrete individuals, artists no longer deal with a collective political goal. Rather, they work on microcosmic motifs derived from the surroundings of their own lives,” commented ZHU in his curatorial statement.

In this exhibition, LI Qing’s paintings express the artist’s attitude towards consumerism. LI’s recent works are paintings on discarded windows to create overlapping scenes of the interior space and outside environment. Qingtai HU adapts other people’s ideas for his work and thus achieves his artistic creativity via eliminating his own personality. CHENG Ran’s video emphasizes on the instant experience in an ever-changing environment through which the artist responds to the contemplation of life. Every piece of YANG Xinguang’s work is like a metaphor of the contemporary life. For example, he carved stones with a machine to leave traces similar to those left by worms, and thus creates a metaphor of industrialization. Through handcraft, NI Youyu transforms the meaning of objects. In his work Ruler, he marked the meter according to his own judgment, revealing the difference between subjectively and objectivity. ZANG Kunkun’s recent series “Brown” depicts public fitness equipment in a way that reminds us of instruments of torture, implicating the power and violence exerted by the authority.

*image (left)
© Cheng Ran 
courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery