Zhu Yingying at Hunsand Space / Beijing

Zhu Yingying / Rabbit Hole

March 20 – May 2, 2021

Hunsand Space

No.2, 798 West Street, 798 Art District

Beijing, China













*photo credits:
Images courtesy of the artist and Hunsand Space


Comprised of five series of paintings, the works on view in this exhibition have been completed over the last two years since the artist’s latest solo, “Nymph.” With a creative impulse grounded on observing the “image”. Zhu Yingying’s works on canvas have embodied a gradual process as such observation zooms in on the objects – a progression from portraying the entire image to focusing on the peripheries, and now examining the details while enlarging them. Compared to her previous works, a shift of the painted medium took place – changing from oil on board to oil on canvas. The artist shifts from presenting the oversight of hard-edge images to nuanced portrayals of the objects’ details.


As Zhu Yingying shifts focus, her source material’s details – often taken from found photographs – get magnified. Throughout this observation, the perception of the subject matter changes. As the artist furthers this exploration of the relationship between photography and painting, she pushes the boundaries of these two mediums through her experiments. Zhu dismantles the painted image’s internal narratives and replaces them with juxtapositions of fragments on a given canvas. Zhu Yingying’s repetitive depiction of the same photograph to various renditions of the same type of pictures visualizes the transforming relationship between objects and between the observer and the object through this unique way of observation, which in turn, gives the images themselves a dynamic agency or even a system of reflection. Thus, with the way in which these images are presented, the actual meanings of the objects fade, while a lyrical ontology begins to emerge. As the artist writes on a piece of paper:
 
Plates, table, sofa, trousers, shoes,
Round edges expand continuously,
Even beyond the canvas
A seemingly glistening rabbit hole, its center blurs,
By the light on the edges
Biased and narrow thoughts
As a helicopter rises and descends
The lustrous plate jets off the canvas,
Truth disappears, leaving behind a phenomenon.
A dam pieced together by vernaculars and vocabularies,
Whose height is about to flood away.
As more discourses rush to fill in the new crevasse and fracture
Bringing simpler reckonings on simple things.