Zhang delves into deep themes with focus on the banal
Print Edition
ZHANG Enli perhaps is now one of hottest artists in China. His paintings are coveted by the upper-class including entrepreneurs, collectors and celebrities.
Zhang’s first-ever solo exhibition is currently displayed at Pop Up Space in Hong Kong.
He built a low-ceiling cardboard chamber with a thick central pillar, inviting viewers to move deeper through the installation before returning to its opening. Thick and earthy green, brown, and yellow brushstrokes are layered across rows and columns of square cartons posing as walls, occasionally broken by blue patches to conjure images of Hong Kong’s thriving and congested environment.
Contrast of light and shadows creates a sense of mystery, immersing the viewer in a cocoon where each new façade may invoke a personal memory.
In addition to this special installation, the exhibition also includes two of Zhang’s recent paintings — “Space” and “Container” — featuring the artist’s signature iconography, made famous for using everyday objects and spaces as main subjects matters to impart new life to the world of the mundane.
Born in 1965 in a provincial town of Jilin in the north of China, Zhang is dissatisfied with the image of contemporary Chinese art as defined by pop and politics. For him, the most commonplace objects are what connect China to the rest of the world: tables, chairs, benches, pots, boxes...
He has moved away from his former, wildly gestural and figurative pictures to arrive at a sober style of painting featuring a smaller range of hues and distributed over fewer fields and depicting everyday things. By focusing on ordinary objects, the artist represents the contrast between the small city and the sprawling metropolis — between two differing states of mind and environment.
Unlike many of his Chinese contemporaries, Zhang’s practice does not bear relation to consumer criticism, “Political Pop,” “Kitsch Art,” or “Cynical Realism” that emerged from China during the art boom of their post-socialist society in the 1990s, but instead focuses on the familiar and often overlooked everyday objects and environments the artist encounters on a daily basis, viewed from a unique perspective.
His works are mostly composed in series, such as his paintings that focus on the idea of the container — namely cardboard boxes, ashtrays, tin chests or lavatories. Other works depict functional municipal structures that fill the streets of Shanghai, such as public toilets. Choosing to focus on such seemingly banal and insignificant features, he does not make any grand statement to politics or immortality.
Zhang’s exhibition runs through July 13 at Grand Millennium Plaza on Queen’s Road Central in the Sheung Wan area.
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