On January 15, 2022, the group exhibition of "Symbolic Games" artists opened at the Art Triumph Gallery in Beijing's 798 Art District, and the three participating artists in the exhibition, Chen Xin, Wang Yi and Xu David, all live and work in Shanghai. In addition, this exhibition is also based on the origin of the interactive cooperation between Art Triumph Gallery and Shanghai Liang Project Gallery, twin cities art.
Entering the exhibition hall of Yi Kaixuan Gallery, Chen Xin, Wang Yi and Xu David each exhibited one work. Continuing to walk inside are Chen Xin, Xu David, and Wang Yi's independent display spaces.
Exhibition site
Exhibition site of Chen Xin's work "Fruit NO.1"
The exhibition site of David Xu's work "Untitled"
Wang Yi's wood-paneled oil painting "Night Watch" triptych
Liang Qin, founder of the Liang Project, introduced several artist profiles at the exhibition site. Chen Xin, Wang Yi and David Xu are three Shanghai-based artists who graduated in painting and have been the main medium for their linguistic exploration and self-expression over the past decade or so.
Xin Chen Fruit NO.1 120cm120cm 2019
Chen Xin You are still my rebellious little friend NO.13 60cmX60cm 2021
Chen Xin Heart 120cm120cm 2019
Artist Chen Xin (right) communicates with the guests at the scene
"In the face of an increasingly alienated modern society, flowers or people are no longer a complete state of life, but fragmented." Artist Chen Xin told Artron Art Network at the exhibition site. Although the image of her work is a huge flower, it is named after "Fruit", and the flower and fruit are originally complete life courses and forms, but they are divided and solidified... Chen Xin hopes that people living in the present can face life more directly and freely, rather than being separated and facing the state of life separately. Chen Xin has a keen experience of Dunhuang murals and the "lines" in traditional Chinese painting, and the more flattened spatial relationships in the "Fruit" series and "You Are Still My Rebellious Partner", with refined lines and quaint colors, which together constitute her unique personal language.
"This series of characters comes from my empathy for the niche and marginalized people around me, who live a difficult life in the mainstream society." Chen Xin's characters are often a combination of different people and characters of different genders, and such a mixed state has formed Chen Xin's concept of painting from the surface and the inside.
David Xu Knight Acrylic on canvas 200×140cm 2020
David Xu Driftwood Acrylic on canvas 120×160cm 2015
Entering the exhibition space of David Xu's works, the space will be recut and reorganized by the picture into a strange scene. The huge cold-tuned cement columns and the artificial tile walls with colors and shadows in the work "Jungle" form a completely different texture from the dense jungle, but they blend and penetrate each other, forming a huge alienation space between nature and man-made objects...
Artist David Xu (left) and Liang Qin,founder of the Liang Project (right), at the exhibition site
"In the spatial structure of overall rationality, the specific form is more dependent on my intuition." Each part of David Xu's work has rich variations, and it is difficult to find some kind of inertial logic, but countless accidents together constitute the temperature and interest of the lines, color blocks, and so on of the space.
For example, "Knight" comes from David Xu's oil painting "Don Quixote" by the great French realist artist Dumière of the 19th century, an idealistic lone knight, a skinny white horse like him, in the sun of the wilderness, like a phantom. David Xu paints idealistic dream images with free brushstrokes that are beyond reality, and it is also his "realization of some kind of thinking and psychological dialogue outside of reality." ”
In Shanghai's Songjiang district, there are more and more artists like David Xu from all over the country, who are like lonely "knights" constructing their own idealistic pictorial worlds.
Wang Yi Snorkel oil on canvas 150×200cm 2021
Wang Yi Panbing Oil on canvas 80×120cm 2021
In the third exhibition space of the gallery, the clear and recognizable brushstrokes of the artist Wang Yi's works, the texture and writing of the formation, the blurred boundaries of the images or the flickering light spots with poetic dreamy narratives, as if the passage of time has also become touchable...
Wang Yi was inspired by Western fairy tales and travel experiences. But his work does not focus on the development of the plot or the image of the characters, but creates specific moments and scenes with a symbolist style to express the inner emotions and spirit.
Artist and Works: Chen Xin
Chen Xin was born in 1982 and now lives and works in Shanghai.
Xin Chen Fruit No.3 Oil on canvas, acrylic, oily marker pen 120× 120cm 201
Chen Xin You are still my rebellious partner No.8 oil on canvas, acrylic 50×50cm 2021
Chen Xin's recent works use paintings and installations on shelves to explore people's yearning and lack of free will, emotion, and experience after entering the digital age, under the guidance of instrumental rationality.
In this exhibition, Chen Xin's works mainly include two parts. One group is flowers, titled the Fruit series. Part of it is a depiction of a single flower: a blooming flower almost fills the canvas, with smooth lines, full structure, strong color contrasts and even conflicts. For example, in the work "Fruit 01", the petals are white flat painted, and the part is coated with a faint pink; Because Chen Xin often uses fluorescent materials in her creations, this makes the petals appear particularly white and bright. But in the middle part of this white petal, the flower bud is a large clump of black, and there is a black pigment scattered around the edges, like a splash of ink. This clash between black and white is reminiscent of the contrast between black and white in Manet's Olympia. The blacks and black cats in Manet's paintings resemble a mystery hidden in the background, setting off and reinforcing the bold exposure of the white body in the foreground. Chen Xin's black flower buds are like challenging and even profane forces bursting out from the picture, directly destroying the elegant and holy imagination of flowers created by the petals.
Artist and works Introduction: Wang Yi
Wang Yi was born in 1984 and lives and works in Shanghai, China. Shanghai University School of Fine Arts, Bachelor's degree, major in painting; New York Institute of the Arts, M.S., Painting.
Wang Yi Rupture Oil on canvas 200×200cm2021
Wang Yi Nightingale Oil on canvas 153×115cm2021
Wang Yi Rose Oil on canvas 150×200cm2021
Among Wang Yi's works in this exhibition, "Nightingale" and "Rose" are both from Wilde's "Nightingale and Rose". The nightingale waters the rose with her own blood to fulfill the protagonist's pursuit of love, but such a sacrifice is exchanged for the rose being ruthlessly abandoned, thus showing the vanity and indifference of the pursuer, and the coldness and widowhood of the pursuer. This tragic story is a lament and condemnation of the emotional indifference between people and people in modern society. In the work "Nightingale", the purple trunks are thick and erect against a dark background, while the birds are delicate and weak. Nightingales looked up and sang into the sky, or wailing, and branches were inserted into their chests. And in Rose, the suitor is illuminated by the aura, a humble posture; The pursuer is in the dark, and the posture is graceful and noble but pale. The theme rose of the painting is just a small dark red flower in the picture, hanging low in the dark gray background, dim and dull. Wang Yi's theme chose two key images in the story, but in the picture, these two images, as well as elements such as characters and trees, are handled in a more abstract color block structure, and there is no detailed depiction. Both works as a whole present a heavy and gorgeous atmosphere, heavy in the overall dark tone of the picture, the shape is prominent and solid, and there is a tragic atmosphere. The magnificence lies in the seemingly relaxed but exquisite use of the pen, as well as the use of some purple and yellow in the picture, which can be said to symbolize the noble sacrifice spirit of the nightingale. Although the images in these two pictures are not depicted in detail, they show the feelings left by this story to the artist and are directly transmitted to the audience.
Artist and Introduction: David Xu
David Xu was born in Zhejiang in 1980. From 2001 to 2005, he studied at the Comprehensive Painting Studio of the Department of Comprehensive Art of China Academy of Art. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.
David Xu Jungle Acrylic on canvas 200×600cm 2015
David Xu has a landscape of lemon on canvas acrylic 55×70cm 2017
David Xu's exhibition "Jungle", which is more than five meters long, depicts a silent and desolate forest scene. But there are no leaves or branches in this jungle, only layers of strong trunks can be seen, and the gaps in the trunks can be faintly glimpsed into the dark jungle depths. The outline of these trunks is drawn with the help of tape and appears particularly hard. They are mostly flat coated in ochre, gray-green or bluish-purple. The trunks are undulating in different shades of earthy yellow terrain, also flattened in the contour lines, so the jungle has a sense of pattern, with a distinctly fictional temperament, but also with special expressiveness. Another of His Jungle's paintings is darker, with tree trunks dominated by dark gray to black tones, but inside a shiny wall of mosaic tiles. The tree on the side was "standing" on a white pedestal, so that it was difficult to tell whether it was a tree or a pillar. In the rest of the picture, there are still a few flames in the depths of the jungle, which makes the whole scene appear a bit eerie.
David Xu Quarry 150X200cm Cloth Bingene 2019
In Shi Hantao's review of the exhibition, he said that although the three artists have different approaches, themes and concepts, there are also some similar characteristics. They all shape the main body and scene of the picture in a more abstract way, and they are good at creating imaginary objects or spaces, and thus embodying and pouring their own feelings and thoughts. Further, the non-realistic objects and spaces they depict are sometimes romantic and mysterious, sometimes contradictory and gloomy, and the viewer can clearly read from them the loneliness, uneasiness and confusion characteristic of the generations. These are typical contemporary painters' exploratory expressions of real life and inner feelings.
This exhibition presents three vivid cases of domestic painting practice. It can be added here that there is also a big background for their creation, that is, in the past ten years, painting is rejuvenating in the art ecology at home and abroad. Over the past hundred years, painting has been repeatedly declared dead under the onslaught of various new art genres such as photography, conceptual art, social intervention, and institutional critique. And when ideas, theories, social movements, and popular interests flock in the name of social responsibility and political correctness, it seems that it is difficult for the painter to stand quietly in front of the canvas and work anymore. But the essence of art lies in its individuality, so the artist can learn about and absorb all kinds of new practices and theories outside the painting room, but when he stands back in front of the canvas, he still has to return to himself. The small flat space of the canvas gives the artist the opportunity to continue to insist on his ego, even insisting on confusion, escape, incorrectness, and insisting on acknowledging the complexity and elusiveness of life and the world. The three artists in this exhibition can be said to be such an artistic practitioner, who refuses to instrumentalize painting, but integrates the canvas and life, and sincerely uses the brush to paint their truest feelings and thoughts.
It is reported that the exhibition will last until February 28.
Symbolic game
Exhibition time: 2022.1.15-2.28
Venue: Triumph Gallery
Artists: Chen Xin, Wang Yi, Xu David