For Zhang Enli, painting is the consequence that comes from the self-memories and complicated growth experience. Continuously selecting things we were familiar with as his topics, Zhang let the ignored things be newly focused on once more.


Zhang Enli has his new painting test on space this time after thinking. He 'replicated' the first apartment he lived in Shanghai in the late 90's in the space of 'Objectif_exhibition' Antwerp. Whereas it's far from merely a replicated 'apartment' for there's nothing real inside. Zhang Enli painted the traces of living on the wall of the apartment that emerged after people abandon it. The outlines of furniture, which left on blank wall or floor, are shallow or dark. These traces suggest the theme of Zhang Enli's works when we're watching at it—'lose and leave'. It seems like that uncertain light and dark with positive and negative form trigger the imagination, the audiences gradually realize the work behind that nostalgic feeling with faint traces and the times they are all changing, which, at the same time, emphasize a kind of nostalgia from the nature of things. We make a kind of equivalent to the concrete objects and processes of an action: the spirit of our own focus on the whole image, until it slowly fading away. The memory would gradually be fulfilled and cannot be forgotten.