One Year presents a new collection of paintings by Chinese-born artist Zhang Rui. Having moved to Sydney one year ago, the body of work in One Year portrays Rui’s development of a visual language working across the context of her experiences of China and Australia. Faced with new physical and psychological environments, the artist’s new work draws on a vast array of images – usually sourced from the internet – as a means of reading or engaging with her surroundings. The results are dense and at times visually cryptic paintings that subtly combine the autobiographical with political threads and interweave personal and social worlds.

The conceptual development of Rui’s works indicate a broad cultural practice that encompasses an education in Western oil painting, an ongoing interest in the Wumen School painters of China and a broader interest in how to express a sense of humanism through painting. Rui’s practice reveals the complexity of translating meaning across cultural and geographical distances despite the expanding reach of technology. Presented as a series of constellations the works in One Year produce a sense of meaning through a cumulative reading of the language and imagery embedded in the canvases.

Zhang Rui was born in 1983 in Tianjin, China and graduated from the Department of Painting, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. She has presented work internationally, both in China and Europe, including the solo exhibition Freedom We Need, Laden No.5 Gallery, Bad Ems (2011). Rui has also participated in a number of group exhibitions including Fang – then there was no more living room, 978 Art District, Beijing (2007); Xu Ni, Cao Chang Di Art Space, Beijing (2008) and Mud, curated by Ai Weiwei, China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. Rui met Weiwei as a participant in his acclaimed project, Fairytale, presented as part of dOCUMENTA (12), Kassel, Germany (2007).

Image: © Zhang Rui, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art