Untitled: Inked Rhythm 

Laser-cut flashspun nonwoven HDPE garden, pigments, UV-printed mirror panels

Fosun Foundation, Shanghai 

October 21-30, 2022

 

Visitors entering the gallery are confronted by three monumental paper sculptures that are ebony in base tone, with highlights of blue, green, purple and gold pigments. The gallery floor and surrounding walls are built from reflective material that is steeped in rich hues of blue and green rendered in abstract strokes and compositions. The panels resemble fragments from an enlarged painting palette, rearranged in modular square plates.

 

This installation actualizes traditional Chinese landscape painting elements in three-dimensional form and recreates them inmonumental scale and in modular repetition, borrowing Minimalist formal principles. Pigmented paper manifests the strength and power of metal, which is symbolic of the might of industrial age. There within lies the contradicting qualities embodied in this work: the frailty and softness of paper vs the impenetrability of metal in appearance, poetics of tradition vs steeliness of industry. The abstraction and deconstruction of the color palette of the blue-green style landscape painting is a further juxtaposition of paradisiacal allusions to distance past in contrast to the currency of contemporary industrial age. 

 

The exhibition Ten Thousand Mountains of Magnificent Colors, curated by Cao Dan and supported by Mercedes-Maybach, prompts participating artists to respond to artistic traditions in relationship with industrial design.