The two artist exhibition “Reciprocal Plane” 同一平面 opened on August 8th (the first day of Chinese Autumn) showing work by Shanghai artist Huang A Zhong and myself.
With Xiao Yan Ling and Prof Huang in the orange shirt
Many thanks to CRI China Radio International for this video clip.
“Tong yi pingmian” literally means same plane. The title was chosen as a merging of work from different perspectives. Professor Huang of Fine Arts at Shanghai University Zhong mentions in the Artron review of the show
“…the cultural differences from East and West , these contrasts are worked out on a common ground, there are consistent aesthetics on essential things.”
Click here for the Artron article in Chinese
These three photos are of Prof Huangs work.
Huang has exhibited many of his oil landscapes of an older Shanghai and other Chinese towns and cities. Also are some fragmented in motion- still lives which remind of early cubist work. Some landscapes are of travels to Italy and Turkey.
One of the smaller paintings by Huang used an interesting underlayer of a local map while overseas.
Painting over an illustration such as a map evokes a response from the sugar paintings by the other artist on the adjacent wall.
My work was also playing with surface and underlayers.
With varying degrees mixed media of sugar and other material , this was painted over to obscure the reading of the underlayer of digital print. I had four sugar paintings displayed here.
One of the Chinese visual sensibilities I have learned since arriving in Beijing is the notion that the surface represents the new and the current but you need to deep deeper to get to the past. This is so evident when looking out at the corner of the entrance of Dong Yue art Museum.
Photo: Mr Yuan Qiulai introduces Prof Huang to my friend Dr LiZhen and family
On the outside is the modern metropolis of the city of Beijing and inside the Dong Yue Gallery there are the ancient wooden beams with faded markings of illustrations suspended overheard harking back to the 700 years when the foundations were built. This notion also reminds me of how a Beijing friend pointed out to me a few years ago why Chinese prefer jade to diamonds. The underlayer of mineral formation is of great value and interest for the Chinese viewer. For example the impression of milky softness inside the hard stone, the suggestion of liquid movement as the mineral concentrations shift under the hard polished surface. The hard dazzling multi facetted surface of a diamond is all reflected light and has no such under-layer value .
The yellow Ginko paintings are of an area in Olympic Park and three of these works are bound for the orthopedic department Huaxin Hospital , first affiliated hospital to Tsinghua University . The next post will consider this work in more detail.
