31 showcases three separate, solo exhibitions by the artists Jiang Zhi, Heidi Voet and Gao Weigang. Working in various mediums and with their own distinctive conceptual approaches to art making, these previously unseen works provide a glimpse into the diversity of contemporary art practice today.
Jiang Zhi: A Thought Arises
Known for his highly conceptual photography and video works, Jiang Zhi presents a new series of vibrant, large-scale, oil paintings. These works, which hark back to American hard edge abstract painting of the 1960’s and 70’s, were originally composed with a computer mouse on a malfunctioning PC. By moving the dialogue box across the computer monitor beautiful compositions and intertwining patterns emerged in its path. The artist states that “This is a world that appears by sudden inspiration; a world that can be changed and renewed at anytime. It is vulnerable, accidental, and transitory.” These instantaneous images, which were rendered with simple hand gestures on a distressed computer terminal, have then been meticulously painted onto extra large canvases. The stunning results are not only an ironic response to the legacy of nonrepresentational painting in the digital age but also an inquiry into the computer as a source of concrete information.
Shown in tandem with the paintings are a video work and a small selection of photographs. These works act as punctuation to the canvases and help to reveal the true psychological and conceptual tenor that is central to Jiang’s work. Like the canvases, Light of Transience, a video which depicts the trajectory of natural light through a reflection of a plastic bag over the course of an afternoon and the photographs of needles ordered in simple configurations, help to indicate the order of things as a fragile, malleable and fleeting condition. Seen together the works in Transiency reveal the impressionistic and transient energy that lies behind our experience of reality.
Heidi Voet: Is Six Afraid of Seven?
If our fast-pace life and the kaleidoscope of material things that fill it engender apathy, Heidi Voet’s work acts as an antidote. Throughout her oeuvre, the artist re-creates scenes and fragments from our daily encounters using unlikely yet common materials. She transforms the banal into something wondrous, and in the process unearths concerns, connections and consequences that underlie each moment.
The centerpiece of Voet’s solo show at SGA, Is six afraid of seven/ ‘cause seven eight nine/ I’m about to lose the pieces I find, is an elaborate carpet woven together from over four thousand, multicolored digital watches. Time’s web is here re-made as a whimsical interpretation of an often-overlooked domestic object, and yet the periodic sounding of the watch alarms reminds the viewer of the subtle yet unceasing march of temporality. Equally spectacular is Ersatz, a large-scale rendering, in the unlikely material of gingerbread, of a tag that the artist found on Shanghai’s famous fringe, Moganshan Road graffiti wall. A nod to Shanghai’s rapid urbanization, the work explores the tension between comfort and domesticity and change and dynamism which attend the city’s explosive growth. In her photographs, as well as vase and flower sculptures, Voet again transforms ordinary materials into surreal delusions that, this time, offer a sly critique on the representation of women. By cutting, folding, and thus de-contextualizing nude images of women, appropriated from ‘fine art photography’ magazines, she highlights and pokes fun at the assumptions behind these depictions.
In spite of the varied nature of Voet’s oeuvre, there is a lightness that runs through much of her work which seducesthe audience into questioning their surroundings. Her art reflects her choice to imbue the daily grind with a fleeting magic, and invites the viewer to do the same.
Gao Weigang: Everything Isn’t Gonna be Alright
Winner of this year’s ART FUTURES prize at the HK Art Fair, Gao Weigang is one of the most promising yet undiscovered artists of his generation. In his first exhibition in Shanghai, Everything Isn’t Gonna be Alright the artist inverts the title of Bob Marley’s celebrated song of hope and acceptance into a forecast of doom. In the exhibition a homage to the reggae hero, in the form of his image emblazon on a workers tarp, commemorates not so much the artist’s life as it does his premature death and the unfulfilled promise that everything will indeed be alright. Through a selection of works in various media Gao continues to wax metaphysical, toying with the boundaries between truth and perception, disillusion and deception. His conceptual strategy, although laden with an overriding sense of skepticism, still retains a poetic and sometimes humorous approach to the human condition. Placed in front of the atrium space are two marble pedestals in which the attendant lions have abandoned their posts, leaving not only an implied sense of vulnerability but also the lion’s disrespectful remains.
Inside the atrium, the artist has etched an enormous image of the Parthenon into a cinderblock wall. This enormous relief work, symbolizing Western architectural greatness, not only reminds us of present power shifts in the world but the dubious nature of collectively accepted truths – that this icon is indeed important and powerful because we have been told it is. This ontological sentiment is echoed in Boom! Boom! Boom!, a canon that fires upon the garish Pudong cityscape across the Huangpu River, metaphorically razing this city of 7 million, and along with it the myth of China’s economic progress. Other works, such as a wall sculpture depicting a staircase in diminishing perspective, function merely as an abstract gesture. Stairs connote a sense of upward mobility, progress, and ascendance yet in this case it is constructed out of mirrored stainless steel, reflecting back our own expectations and reminding us of the power and often fallibility of our cognitive faculties.
