Looking the paintings of Zhang Yingnan reminds of a few images roaming around deep in memory; the forlorn atmosphere of Edward Hopper, the discreet indoors and the silence of Vilhelm Hammershoi, the surrealism of René Magritte which distorts familiar scenes, the stark contrast between scenes of modern life of Jia Zhangke. These pieces of silence which are similar with Zhang’s paintings are stimulating. Zhang’s paintings are impressive enough to trigger the images deep down in subconscious.

Born in 1981, studied oil painting at Xian Art School, Zhang’s paintings focus on the psychological solitude and agony of contemporary men. Human alienation is the common symptom of the age, found not just in China and Korea but in every place which experienced rapid industrialization and modernization. A sense of emptiness piercing through our age compels Zhang to dig deep into the root of our solitude and express the emptiness of existence in daily life, alienated and fragmented scenes of daily life in his paintings. The title of this exhibition, <The Forgotten Temperature> quotes directly from the title of one of his paintings. On brilliantly sun-lighted stairs, someone dropped a pair of blue gloves and left it there. The contemplating gaze of Zhang captures a sense of emptiness in evanescent moments fading into oblivion. Being introduced for the first time to Korean audience, ‘The Forgotten Temperature,’ ‘The Origin of Memory,’ ‘Lost Time,’ ‘The Glory of the Intertwined,’ ‘There is Darkness, There is Brightness,’ ‘Nobody Applause,’ and ‘Broken Embraces’ are both poetic and isolated as are suggested in linguistic imageries of the titles.

The mixture of scenes of modern life and scenes of nature in his paintings leads to isolation and solitude of human, and an unknown life which transcends all these. The paintings, which are the re-creation of his own life, have unique mixture of scenes of mind and nature. A scrape of icy cold blue cloth lying in the woods, a chair and a door in the deep silence of night; the solitude of these objects and the surreal environments in which these are placed are like poems and lead the audience into the plot of paintings. The contrast between the natural and the artificial is stark but the paintings give off a serene reflection of embracing the dissonance between the reason and the senses.

There’s a man deep in his thoughts sitting in a very incongruous place of geometric characteristics in the woods. The human figures in his painting rarely look at audience. They almost always look away, out into the other side, the faraway. Some even looks metamorphosed from their thought with their heads inside boxes. The same goes to the towering apartment in a vast meadow, and the suitcase in the woods. These are the metaphors of being left alone, the widespread loneliness in our time. Looking at the human and material figures expands the imagery of mind into the scenes of the paintings. The contrast, discord, conflict, escape, yearning, and hope we experience lie scattered about in those familiar yet surreal backgrounds. Theses figures left alone give off a sense of emptiness but not necessarily of loneliness because they are placed in a mixture of nature, modern life, and imagery of mind. Rather, the incongruous mixture of imagery of mind and surreal scenes tear down the wall between what’s real and what’s not, make people see with contemplation and tolerance.

These days, ever-changing modern technology is sought after but the relations between people are getting farther apart, mediated by cell-phones and Internet. None of these things holds the clarity and warmth of the echoes reverberating between hills of mountains in my childhood memory.
(Zhang Yingnan, excerpt from the artist’s note)

Zhang comes to a halt in the midst of speed of our age racing us at heel and looks back on the vestige of the past. The sense of loneliness and lost which comes from contemplating our daily life seeps through the air, through the places. ‘The echoes reverberating between hills of mountains’ are resurrected into the sphere of the everyday, with the solitude of city people. Where the borders separating nature, city and mind crumbled into ruins, there lies the deep breathing between people.
- Somi Sim (Curator, Gallery Skape)

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Gallery Skape