FEIZI Gallery will host the exhibition "Paint Beyond the Frame". Curator Cui Cancan has invited three young artists, Guan Yinfu, Feng Zhengquan, and Shang Yixin to participate. “Paint Beyond the Frame” explores the effects of recent cultural instabilities on viewers when they are trying to understand the ever changing world around them. Painting should not be limited to a viewing method and form, just as we do not have the same fixed world. The form of painting is changing, as artists adapt to cultural changes and in turn make their own contributions to our understanding of a changing world. This is the significance of this exhibition.
Easel painting is expanding its horizons. People may no longer abide by the conventions of a fixed standard. The development of art history is also associated with this continuous extension, which brings us new gifts, and these gifts are always out of the frame we set in advance. The gifts cause surprise because of uncertainty and indeterminate meanings. People always want to acquire courage for the future from each new gift.
“Paint Beyond the Frame" seems a paradox. While deleting the frame can painting still be called “painting”? This is the question. Just as this world puzzles us every day, we should still insist on truth, still keep trying to understand warnings from the past, just as each generation has warnings for the future.
If the discussion of painting's visual and spatial dynamics is the first element of understanding painting, then painting is necessary for exploring what is possible in a certain space. Does painting only serve the visual sense? Obviously, this is difficult to set up in a contemporary context. Painting is not a visual game, neither is it a simple aesthetic and form of problems. Painting style is different from form and concept, and form and concept different from the counter-forces in a painting. When people look at a painting, the visual is the first sensation captured by the eyes, then people start to identify the objects, and materials, as well as forms, then recognize the meaning of the text through a combination of experience, memory, and knowledge. Thereby, the construction of a painting's meaning is completed.
Discussion of theory inclines one to talk about stratagems on paper, but artistic practice is the best tool for testing and verifying theory. Guan Yinfu, through steel grinding, which leaves variable traces of images on steel plates under variable lighting and other environmental factors, moves beyond a single fixed image of painting. Feng Zhengquan daubs paint on the walls and paints these colors on the canvas, with the canvas in different sizes stimulating a debate between actual paint and paint on the canvas. The painting's main idea and the object's identity are also interchangeable. Shang Yixin has been exploring visual composition through the act of painting; in his series of works, the scene between the wall and the paintings seems to have some kind of necessary relationship, light and shadows crossing over, while each series of his works incorporate promotions of ideas and physical expressions.
"Paint Beyond the Frame" is just the beginning, as discussions of the nature of painting, reflections on compositions, explorations in form, and new possibilities of artistic expression, lead us towards a new understanding of paintings' meaning...
