The Picture Is Not at Ease

By Kisito Assangni - Thursday, November 5, 2020
The Picture Is Not at Ease

“The Picture Is Not at Ease” is an exhibition of three artists Chen Ying, Su Yu-Xin and Wang Ziquan, showcasing their creative exploration in the visual fields of painting, video and relief and latest works. The mechanism of drew picture produces new meaning and new space for reading with the profound changes in the world order and daily experience brought by the pandemic.

Image: Su Yu-Xin, Sunset and hums, Oil, acrylic and pastel on flax, 2019

 

“The Picture Is Not at Ease” is an exhibition of three artists Chen Ying, Su Yu-Xin and Wang Ziquan, showcasing their creative exploration in the visual fields of painting, video and relief and latest works.

The mechanism of drew picture produces new meaning and new space for reading with the profound changes in the world order and daily experience brought by the pandemic.

 

Chen Ying, About Shape Similarities, Oil on canvas, 2017

 

This exhibition focusses on painting as a medium, and extend to video and relief works to explore the rich possibilities of picture-reading and the diversified development of visual language.

The artistic practices of Chen Ying and Su Yu-Xin are primarily painting. Chen Ying's paintings express the infatuation and exploration for perceptual embodiment and visual abstraction. With the characteristics of its symbolic geometric figures, Chen Ying's works advance and separate from the abstracted scenes which are reconstructed from the figures, and gradually strengthen the shapes and pictures, as well as the interaction among colors, structures and textures, which also derive and restrain each other. In this exhibition, the artist presents new works under different directions since his solo exhibition at KWM Art Center last year. Part of the exhibited works continue the artist's past style, while the others explore new working methods. Taking the disassembled human body shape and hair style as the modeling basis, the artist deduces from the concrete and abstract picture structure and color relationship, and counteracts the meaning of the form itself. The application and conversion of random brushstrokes create more overlapping spaces, thus expand more possibilities and richer viewing experience of abstract pictures.

 

Su Yu-Xin, Sunset and hums, Oil, acrylic and pastel on flax, 2019

 

Su Yu-Xin's paintings focus on capturing the connections among visual, language and neural perception. By painting as an action, she investigates people's experience of a certain object (landscape, object) in real life, and explores how to change the method of picture production and reproduction in turn; or, whether the way audience reads the picture may affect their experience of reality. All kinds of water body in landscapes are the themes that often appear in the artist’s creation, where the elements of sky, water surface, mountain and rock occur many times in different works. The tangible and intangible matter compete in shape and define each other’s boundaries, penetrating and transforming the way they occupy space. Red-Eye Flight visualizes the relative geographical location and the vacuum time in flight state. Also presented in the exhibition is Su Yu-Xin’s latest works, a series of wooden object paintings in mobile phone scale. These hand-made wooden and plaster objects are polished, shaped and painted with a very close working distance, and the viewers are also required to approach the picture, offering a more intimate reading experience. These picture objects are interspersed among the large-scale works in the exhibition space, providing a rhythm similar to the picture-intakes during our lives in social distance for the past half year.

Wang Ziquan, Away from the Sun, Single-channel video, 2020

 

Wang Ziquan's latest video and reliefs works expand the visual experience from screen and the Internet. The artist’s creations come from his unique observation and understanding of the Internet and the virtual world. Through computer images and narrative videos, he copies and pastes between the virtual and physical space to explore the thresholds of virtuality and reality. In his latest relief work, Wang Ziquan uses computer to create fictional character figures, which are provided with both the realistic and the abstract of human body modeling. These digital figures are detached, disassembled and flattened, then covered with transparent plates engraved with imprint wireframes and bones. In the logic of computer image, these wireframes and thresholds are the real pictures, not the figure itself. Presented at the same time is his latest video work Lychee Park, a fictional story that happened before software rendering. It continues the artist’s previous CG narrative image, creating a chaotic and fragmented visual aesthetics between video art and CG images.

 

Kisito Assangni is a Togolese-French curator, art consultant, and farmer who studied museology at Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Currently living between UK, France and Togo, his research focuses primarily on psychogeography and the cultural impact of globalisation. He investigates the modes of cultural production that combine theory and practice. He inherently aims at going beyond the usual relations between artist, curator, institution, audience, and artwork in order to engage audiences in encounters with art that are unexpected, transformative, and fun. His discursive public programs and exhibitions have been shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale; ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Malmo Konsthall, Sweden; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; Es Baluard Museum of Art, Palma, Spain; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; Marrakech Biennale among others. Assangni has participated in talks, seminars, and symposia at numerous institutions such as the British Museum, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Ben Uri Museum, London; Pori Art Museum, Finland; Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen (Norway); Bamako Encounters Photography Biennial, Mali; Sala Rekalde Foundation, Bilbao; COP17 Summit, South Africa; Depart Foundation, Malibu (USA); Sint-Lukas University, Brussels; Motorenhalle Centre of Contemporary Art, Dresden (Germany); Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino, Switzerland. Assangni is the founder of TIME is Love Screening (International video art program) and art advisor for Latrobe Regional Gallery in Victoria, Australia.
Stephanie Cime

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