Visual Literacy explores how meaning is communicated through a process of reading art and how easily viewers can be deceived by first impressions. The exhibition showcases works from four artists, creating a dialogue between photographers Wang Lang and Tian Taiquan, and painters Wang Jun and Xiang Guohua.

In his Internet Focus series, Tian Taiquan combines an array of Internet images depicting the stories of newsworthy individuals.  He creates a blurred mosaic visual for each character composed of real web pages he has sourced from online blogs, websites and media reports.  The unfolding of information channels for each person serves as the artist’s alert on these stories and likewise creates a character profile for the viewers.

Similar to Tian Taiquan, Wang Lang provides an aesthetic platform for the re-interpretation for the transformation of society by compelling audiences to rethink the characters and controversies of ‘newsworthy’ topics and persons from a new angle. Wang Lang expands his focus on recent news events to include persons and situations from China’s not-so-distant history.

Xiang Guohua and Wang Jun confront the transfer of information through the medium of painting, yet each engages in uniquely personalized approach. Articulating their view of a world as one dominated by collective representations of social and political realities. Wang Jun spent five years (2003 to 2008) painting over every magazine he had read and collected from his early adulthood in Chongqing. A reader who describes his habit as an “obsession to devour what is happening around me,” Wang Jun began painting with black ink over words and images of the magazines he had collected. Reading 11 is a site-specific installation of his Reading performance in which the artist filled his studio with more than 1000 painted magazines and newspapers during a period of five years.

Xiang Guohua’s landscapes echo Wang Jun’s meticulous detail and painstakingly patience. In what first appears as an abstract painting on closer view is reviled as a famous Chinese ink painting and/or literati poem divided into segments of varying colors and fragmented images. Xiang initiates a personal examination of his favorite Chinese ink paintings, to reinterpret the aesthetic and meaning in regards to his own generation.

Whether it is the scrutiny of significant news or famous artworks, underlying in Visual Literacy is a thread of inquiry linked by the works of four artists being transferred to a third party.