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Gallery Yang
No.20, East of 798 Originality Square
B District in 798 Art Zone, No.2 Jiu Xianqiao Road
Chaoyang District, Beijing, China   map * 
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Reservoir Dogs
by Gallery Yang
Location: Gallery Yang
Artist(s): ZONG Ning
Date: 27 Jun - 9 Aug 2015

For an artist, solo exhibition is not merely to display his works. It is like a narrative of a particular person, presenting the status, the state of mind, and the situation of this person, as well as various responses he makes – something like a motley of autobiography, fragmentary speeches, and longings. In the structure of this narrative, works are no more than refractions of a personal life, and exhibition hall a specimen showcasing scattered information. It resembles the case of a honey bee: the pollination being finished, the bee has to leave the flowers, go back to requite its hive, and then start another round of its cyclic life.

Zong Ning grew up both on grassland and in new industry city. In the movement of the Support Border Areas, his father, together with the family, moved to Wulagai, and later to Wuhai. Like the most of kids that time, Zong Ning had a childhood life of austerity yet not lack of good moments and simple happiness. He went to Beijing from a small township in 2001, and lived in basement for a long time. He had been student of fine arts college, teacher of painting class, private tutor, creator of a website, hand of commercial painting, and assistant of artists - livelihood being his primary concern. In those days, artistic creation was for him a meaningless consumption: it was too abundant in resources to be resigned to its own dying; yet to live, it had to resort to a medley of irrelevant methods. At the back of that iron gate of reality, the happiness of childhood was no more .

In 2001, Zong Ning moved to Heiqiao outside the 5th Ring Road, a place of something like the late Painter Village in the old Summer Palace. Over 1,000 artists, with aspirations and almost nothing else, lived in Heiqiao, where the conditions were even worse than in Zong Ning’s small hometown, although it was located in Beijing, an “international metropolis” in the remote eyes of his family. Here potential hope sneaks up on turbulence, unrest, and perseverance.For as long as several years, Zong Ning had been fanatically painting various imaginary scenes, and taking notes of the relations between himself and the real life. On those pictures painted and repainted, were his own feelings unfettered by the world. This artistic activity brought no goodness in the utility sense of the word, yet was crucially important to him. Through it he threw off the shackles of prejudice, obtained the right of free decision, and crossed the boundary of time and space. He often got deeply drunk in the dull life. Against the completely unchanged situation, his wantonness and sense of oppression seemed at once respectable and hopeless.

Contrary to the cheap structure of reality, Zong Ning’s work had an imposing force of impact. He added to his situation some fresh braces of imagination, abrupt switches between dialogues and thoughts, fantasies of impromptu, and natural rhythm of desire. Various daily items and aesthetic forms made up a jungle distortedly growing, in which all are interdependent and hold each other up. In those paintings are flashing stories and bluffing weirdness – one can sense the hotness of animal, the variational growth of flesh, the air of skull, blood and rottenness, the sound of collision of fleshes and the howl of man, and the unwashable depression and sordidness. These scenes bear a resemblance to the basement where he had lived, with the air of “base” and a mixture of specious information of reality. One might also say, the scenes come pretty close to reality itself, growing in accordance with the logic of reality – a ruin in which men had struggled with inferior life and no one survived.  

Things changed each day of the 20-day span of setting up the exhibition, resulting in an ambivalent scene like fragmentary speeches. It contains lots of information, genuinely yet separately, in its two worlds segregated by an iron gate, narrating the several years here of a person. It is as it were a solidified moment, spreading in wild field crazily, absurdly, and persistently. Everyone could see that there is something impaled on the spikes of those forks: the selves we aspire to possess and we are dispossessed of. Possibly, only in this moment of poverty, dejection, shame, and honor, as when a dog is juddering off the wet after struggling out of water, could our comprehension of the world go more into the real and deep ground. 

Curator: Cui Cancan

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