2021 West Bund Art & Design: West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, China

Kohei Nawa's “Ether” series began in 2014. They are lean, austere vertical sculptures which are structured via a rhythmic sequence of bulging and tapered segments. Nawa has long deliberated the methodology of visualizing immaterial concepts. Like the “Direction“ series, the "Ether“ series shows the artist's unique way of to expressing directionality and gravitational force.

The First Scenery NO.20218126 is part of a series Chen Yujun embarked on since 2020. The mesmerizing lines and colors, which are characteristic to Chen’s works, render the audience in awe when encountering them. The artist likens the imagery to the first thing we see when we wake up in the morning, in turn referring to the most realistic moments we witness in our daily reality. He emphasizes that on a greater level, sceneries cannot be altered by people, it merely grows and wilts along with time and space, with seasons and climates that shape out different regions. Therefore, from a certain perspective, everyone is a witness of the world. Whether we are able to capture these existence-validating moments through our own eyes is vitally important. It is only within those moments that sceneries are encapsulated, and we are able to find our own shadows. Compared to other more logocentric, socially critical works like the Asia Map series, The First Scenery series is more inclined towards emotional expression, which is also relevant to the subject of “growth” that Chen has been exploring in recent years. Chen commented, “Everything is in a state of flux, transforming, reforming, and splitting again according to its own order. In this work, you can see some modernist structural elements, while also sense the out-of-order entropy.”

Liang Manqi wants to reflect upon herself as well as our current social context through her canvases. She observes that we are always in a state of flux in terms of having to balance out multiple careers and identities at the same time. What especially caught her attention is that the keys which connect all these different social states seem rather unclear. These points of contact are an abstract existence perforating through individuals and their environments. Liang Manqi thus attempts to demonstrate such conflicting, yet harmonious multidimensional paradox through the method of abstraction.

Jing Shijian has always laid his eyes on the issue of art returning to its geographic sites within an overarching international perspective throughout his artistic creation. As the initiator of New West Lake Painting, his works have penetrated into the history of Eastern and Western cultures as well as contemporary social contexts. Across the Water is set against this cultural background and forms critique on reality through the construction of an idealized utopia in order to arrive at the Peach Blossom Spring, or the Garden of Eden of our time. The work features the artist's unique method of composition and his characteristic logic in pictorial narration.  

In the 1920s, Hemingway lived in Paris as a Europe-based journalist, where he invented an absinthe-inspired drink himself called Death in the Afternoon. He had also expressed his love for absinthe in many of his literary works, as his protagonists often seek it to forget their sorrows.

Yan Heng had established his own relationship with Paris as well as opened up to the influence of great European painters in history ever since he first started to study Western painting as a student. A few years ago, when he had the opportunity to stay in Paris for an artist residency program and hold an exhibition there, he felt that he truly testified to the famous quote by Hemmingway in A Moveable Feast, " If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” And this is when he began his "Absinthe" series. Absinthe-Belleville refers to the Parisian metro station Belleville, which is directly translated as “Beautiful City.” It has lived through a long period of history since its establishment, witnessing many calamities including two terrorist attacks in 2016 and the burning of Notre Dame. This is an ancient, enchanting city exuding decadent beauty. The thick and figurative brushstrokes in the two exhibited works here reproduce the image of Hemingway's concentrated expression, Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass, the Parisian subway rails in the style of the 19^th century European Art Nouveau, etc. For the artist, in the same way that the honeycomb simultaneously exudes sweet and smelly odors, so does every other element of this “Moveable Feast.” The "Absinthe" paintings  are the artist’s repeating experimentation surrounding the fantasy stories of art.

Kim Taeho (b.1948, Korea) is one of the representative artists of Korean monochrome art. His repetitive action and progression on two-dimensional surfaces show a reversion to painterly qualities relating to the aesthetics of monochromatic paintings. The concept of Kim’s work is about both constructing and de-constructing. The repeated grid formation are made of densely formed color masses within a spiral structure, thus culminating in the paintings’ thickened body and heightened quality. Kim’s unique structural design and color choices can be seen as the representation of a certain harmony found within Korean modern art.  

Hwang Gyutae made his name as an iconoclast early on in the 1960s with his experimental approaches at the forefront of avant-garde photography, ranging from film burning, borrowing and compositing, analog montage, and double exposure. His interests in digital image in the 1980s led to new frontiers, such as digital montage, collage, and compositing. Through an extended cycle of experimentations, he found pixels – the micro unit of images in a form of dot, in the digital images. Drawn to the infinite possibility and visual potential of these geometric images, Hwang launched his "Pixel" series.

"Pixel" series lacks, or falls short of the basic process of “recording” in photography, and instead harbors “choice” and “magnification.” In other words, his works move away from the traditional process of capturing an object and making it appear on the sensitive film strip, and instead focus on discovering a wide variety of pixels in different forms and colors as they appear in the process of choosing and magnifying images and monitors. That already exists for disparate reasons, ultimately visualizing and materializing them through a range of methods.

Many of Zhu Xiangmin’s paintings are inspired by literary works by the Beatniks: improv jazz, tattoo culture, and sports movements, etc. His interpretation of these foreign and essentially exotic culture stimulated a new self within, one that breaks free from his original state of life. For the artist, the process of painting is exactly the recording of such self-rediscovery.