Mirage features works by Zhang Wenwei and Wang Fanseng, both are Chinese artists currently working in China.

Zhang Wenwei (b.1980) paints Surrealist inspired works depicting faceless figures and life-sized mannequins in dream-like spaces. The figures appearing either distressed or lonely, wander stark terrains or rest in simple furniture and glass vitrines, undisturbed by their bizarre surroundings.

A variety of magnificent natural landscapes such as oceans, seas and mountains have always been referred to as symbols for the idea of freedom and opportunity. Though seascapes and landscapes in Wenwei’s artworks are not entirely straightforward; they are puzzling spaces, being interior and exterior simultaneously, they suggest to the deceptive nature of representation in painting implied famously by René Magritte’s perplexing pipe in The Treachery of Images (1928-29).

Wang Fanseng (b. 1984) paints strange Chinese landscapes in oil on canvas with a fairly limited color palette. He focuses on the mountainous features that are occasionally littered with gnarly trees and minute human figures. The lumps of rocks in groupings appear like ancient raggedy mountains or gigantic contorted saggy limbs. Using the visual strategy of “appropriation”, his odd highland shapes make parody of traditional landscape paintings though it is a form of parody based on the premise of an “observed historical process”.

Echoing the Taoist notion that nature itself is a body, the artist repeatedly presents his images as a metaphor for flesh and the body. He has also stated that his mountains are alive.

-Richard Koh Fine Art

Image: © Zhang Wenwei
Courtesy of the artist and Richard Koh Fine Art