Group Exhibition Don Gallery, Shanghai
May 26, 2012, Don Gallery grandly presents “Youth:Everything in Between - Liu Ren and Su Chang”, a display of their newest work, of the two post-80 artists.
Liu Ren & Su chang, who are very potential artists of their generation, both believes an artist’s work is natural reflection of his age. And so is reflected in Liu Ren’s works from painting to video clips and Su Chang's landscape sculptures. We hope the name “Youth:Everything in between” can allow the audience to link and imagine the look of this era. “Youth” represents age, experience, but also attitudes.
Liu Ren is bringing three sets of his works: painting the eggshell series, "If the Fukushima catastrophe happened in China”, as well as a video work" field". Egg shells have been featured throughout Liu’s creations in recent years. They used to be the symbol of the artist’s fragility, tenancy and helpless of learning English. This time, they are given more significance - the artist life and also his observation of the world. The eggshell oil paintings are processes with several behaviors: Sketching in the darkroom, marking the completion time, copying text messages, throwing into the tank, waiting for images to appear and finally, re-creation of the image. In his 100 * 100cm oil paintings, Liu Ren expresses his understanding of the world in two complete contradictory words: the contradictions and balanced.
"If” is a very important work by Liu Ren in 2011. By portraying a true event, the artist answers to the hypothesis “If the Fukushima catastrophe happened in China”. The mediums in the work are either disposable, like toilet paper, or momentary, like micro-blogging. However, the artist spent significant effort on them, which creates a paradox, and a display of attitude.
Also, Liu Ren’s video work "field" will be exhibited for the 1st time in Shanghai. The artist selects a particular object: cricket, the protagonist of the Chinese unique blood sport in autumn. With the end of a cricket’s short life, the annual race (or betting type), which attracts people from every class in China, comes to an end. In the work “field”, crickets entering the arena are given human personalities, as well as names. And these words are some kind of mapping from real life. Liu attempts to explore the fate, relationship, existence and value between individual lives and the particular space, during the passage of time and life cycle.
Su Chang is bringing his 10 new sculptures, nine of which belong to the "New Village" series. "New Village" was a common residential mode emerged from 70s-90s in the last century. It is characterized usually by the following keywords: six floors (the most floors to not being required to have elevators in the building), flat-topped, concrete structure, undecorated external walls, 20-50 square meters for each apartment, and separate kitchens and sanitary. The buildings were the dream of the majority during that era. The residential mode, which changed Shanghai people’s lives and relationships, has now entered a new round of disappearance. The observation and re-creation of the often overlooked product of the times, has been Su Chang’s long going projects and among his most important category of work.
The gates, roads, and six floored matchbox shaped buildings are all seen in Su Chang’s works. The artist expresses his feelings about the present world, but also his self-training of the aesthetic approach of the natural / artificial landscape. Su Chang learns from the ancients to find context, and to train his own judgment on the landscape through a variety of practice. In modern cities, the natural landscape has been marginalized to the humblest position, and replaced by the buildings. The dead trees by Ni Zan(painter & poet, Yuan dynasty) are today’s sycamores and camphors; the strange building, are Su Chang’s natural landscape like mountains and stones. “New Village” series expresses Su Chang’s view towards this era’s landscape. In his work, these ignored, evaded, or even demolished values cause the audience to rethink, that aesthetic is inseparable from the social background, the pass may not always be the golden age, and that the future is not necessarily better.
And contrary to contemporary society, Su Chang's work, "Young Tree" is the one that reflects his inner world. His modeling of a young plane tree shows the status of the artist himself.
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