Galerie Steph presents Currents: Flow, Fall, Calm, Curl, the first solo exhibition in Singapore of Chinese-born artist Zhang Chun Hong. In both her bold, monumental charcoal works and in her very detailed and precise fine style ink paintings, Zhang explores her own identity in her individual and original visual language through a disembodied accretion of long, black hair. She deftly blends traditional and contemporary techniques in repetitive processes always hinting at the passage of time and mirroring the cadence of a life journey.

Growing up in an artistic family – her parents and two sisters are artists – the classically- trained Zhang began her professional training at 15 years old, receiving her B.F.A. in Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and her M.F.A. at the University of California, Davis. It was during her time in America when she began to experiment with charcoal media, finding it appropriate to large-scale drawing, achieving the heavy darkness to realize the ideas she was striving for in these works. Through her strands, Zhang’s references are layered with allusions to such ideas as life cycle, her relative freedom as a Chinese woman in contemporary society (contrasting the social and physical constraints imposed on her grandmother’s generation) and her immediate living environment. Zhang’s idiosyncratic focus on her art form is articulated through composition, line, scale and space.

In a 2011 interview for Asian American Portraits of Encounter at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (which has since travelled to the Asia Society and is currently at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles), Zhang said she saw herself as a Chinese, female artist in America, using Asian Art aesthetics, tackling universal themes. She invited viewers to find their own passage into her art, expressing a personal flexibility and understanding that each individual has their own life process.

Her new works, to be exhibited in Currents: Flow, Fall, Calm, Curl, are inspired by the Pacific Ocean and Chinese Yellow River. Zhang examines the element of water with a series of large charcoal drawings and Chinese fine style ink paintings that depict ocean waves, river currents and waterfalls from a distance. However, at a closer look, each stroke becomes a strand of hair. Zhang combines hair and water to create an interesting experience between illusion and reality.

Zhang’s work has been exhibited at such prestigious institutions as the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., The Museum of Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo and The Portland Museum of Art, Maine and is represented in a number of public and private collections including Sylvain Levy/DSL Collection on Contemporary Chinese Art, Paris and the White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, Sydney.

-Galerie Steph

Image: © Zhang Chun Hong
Flow
2012
Charcoal on paper scroll
549 x 107cm