Pace London is pleased to present Liang Yuanwei’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The Tension between a Bow and Elephant will include eleven of Liang Yuanwei’s recent oil paintings that deepen both her formal and conceptual investigations of process and perception.
The title of the exhibition, The Tension between a Bow and Elephant elicits Liang Yuanwei’s profound preoccupation with the constants and variables of creative production and the pressures that these exert on the artist. Like a hunter armed with a bow and arrow ready to target his or her prey, Liang views the process of painting as intensely pressure-fueled, highly contingent on both governable and ungovernable forces, conscious decisions and natural phenomena.
The series presented at Pace London is the result of a meticulous approach to painting, and one that Liang has previously employed to reach her envisioned “targets”. Working on individual strips, Liang builds up her varyingly sized canvases with a richly textured impasto technique. In some cases this begins by carving chasms into the surface of paint in order to fill those segments with varying colours.
Cézanne has manifestly been a vivid source of inspiration in Liang’s work, sharing his concerns for the shifting nature of perception, and the painterly ways in which to evoke this. Liang also draws on her Chinese heritage and, in particular, the supremely poetic images of the Song Dynasty that capture transience of beauty and evanescent pleasures. But the direct sources from which the artist works from are often the floral designs of domestic table cloths, curtains and found fabrics, marrying her art to questions of high art and commercial design, and moreover, those pertaining to gender roles and femininity.
“In my own creative practice I imitate the world, thereby understanding the world, in order to create the world. In the process of creating this body of work, the end product remains unrealized, only when the painting is finished can one comprehend its final state.”
- Liang Yuanwei, March 2014.
Making a departure from her early floral paintings, the series presented in The Tension between a Bow and Elephant are a step away from the feminine hues and silky textures Liang once sought. The colours are earthier, and particularly in Untitled 2013.15, the brushwork is significantly more vigorous. All the while, Liang retains the distinctively refined, tender and delicate quality for which she is known.
*image (left)
© Liang Yuanwei
courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery
