SGA WING #4 is pleased to present DISTANT PLACES, where Zhang Yongxu demonstrates the continued relevance of canvas and paint to artistic self-expression.

Much of Zhang Yongxu’s practice is about his travels, observing and seizing upon chance encounters. An abiding theme is the inseparability of art and life and the role played by time; perhaps best captured by the artist to draw on mythic landscapes to transform its circumstances into a vibrant and compelling contemporary allegory. The phenomenology of narrative, its construction and our responses to it, is close to the heart of Zhang’s paintings. The artist is drawn to spaces within stories, not least because they allow the artist to find space for himself in a long line of self-discovery. The dominating element is monumental painted environments and figures based on his journeys he experienced himself. Through mountainous scenarios, driven highways, city buildings and streets, isolated rooms and activities; Zhang uses represented imagery to convey the sense of density, the emotion and ceaseless shimmering of urban reality.

For DISTANT PLACES, the exhibition embraces almost three decades of his practices to explore his hometown, Xinjiang; temporary stays in New York and California, and of his current base, Beijing to numerous new works. The exhibition identifies as much of the subject matter as artist’s own, making the visional as personal as possible. The exhibition is not structured like a retrospective, nor is it chorological. It presents the artists’ works as a single body, whose phases of growth seem dictated by an inner, circular time instead of any linear one. For Zhang, the travels are not just something to be remembered, but also something to be reinterpreted and manipulated, and he is clearly fascinated by the sort of interchange here implied between external and internal terrains. It isequally a study of the mechanisms of narrative, the environment’s understated energies here spurring a story, with an imagery of architecture and portraiture. A deft use of expressiveness for maximum resonance characterizes much of Zhang’s dreamlike paintings. While a discerning observer in his lived experiences, his portrayals unfolding in his mind’s eyes, the artist painted scenes of his homeland, the vast openness of fields and mountains, hinting at a subtext of dependency and longing, alongside rapturous vision of a mythic world belonging to another era and time that allows for vulnerability and offers no resolution.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Shanghai Gallery of Art