Wang Ziling explores perception of external surroundings through reforming the structure of how one sees and perceives. She creates connections between structures and images to encourage and challenge the perception of imagery. By adopting the cavalier perspective of ancient Chinese visual representation of space and time, she links her exploration of our current cultural and visual experience and customs with ancient visual perspectives, whilst simultaneously connecting with the subject and thing in itself. This dual connection creates associative relationships and order between things.
Wang Xiaosong's work is imbued with the influence of the 1960s, characterised by romanticism and critical realism. His recent works are infused with a romantic and critical-realist flavour. It is quasi-abstract work which consists of a group of Chinese characters. They are ideographs made stereo with oil paint. His paintings contain two layers - a foreground and a background. His abilities to handle the binary opposition and the contradictory feelings aroused by his paintings can lead to illusions, on which people may pontificate, meditate even.
Tian Yonghua works with the notion of a utopian vision for his great Chinese nation. He started out as a photographer, but hung his camera on the willows a few years ago. Tian now makes his art on the computer, or better, on a number of computers at the same time. For the great works of art that he makes, a lot of computing power is needed. He talks of paradox, for example of passionate blood uniting China, yet the population being possessed by hopeless devotion, of material; of giants and heroes, though heroes fade and slogans dry up. Essentially he's picking at the deepest questions, those that a great artist pines to answer, or at least relishes the process of trying to.
Ilhwa Kim’s pieces are composed of tens of thousands of seed units. Each seed unit has the combination of straight lines and circles, which compose a tiny single universe in her own physical terms. Each single sheet of paper is dyed by hand with thousands of different colors with various cuts, rolls and layers of paper to make it rigid. Not a single universe has the same shape, look or color.
Employing Chinese aesthetics, meditations on color, nature and form while referencing Impressionism and Western artistic practices, Zhuang Hong Yi’s large-scale, sculptural panels reference the significance of the flower from his native China to that of the blooms in the Netherlands. Zhaung’s use of dual and multi-color palettes subtly shifts tones as the viewer shifts positions. His impasto strokes of daring, bright colours are expressive and unconfined. Colors melt together and paint drips down the canvas, seeping over a collage of delicately unfolded rice paper flowers. The almost sculptural, three-dimensionality makes these works both painting and object. Messiness, variety and chance are all embraced, drawing the viewer in, encouraging contemplation as they immerse us in a tapestry of colour and form.
