Gong Jian
01 Jun - 20 Jul 2012
Gong Jian
Nothing Is Important
1 June – 20 July, 2012
Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Nothing Is Important”, a solo exhibition by Gong Jian showcasing 30 works of art dating back to 2010, to open May 31, 2012.
The exhibition title “It’s Not Important” is Gong Jian’s first solo exhibition following the 2008 transformation of his paintings. Throughout the past few years, Gong Jian’s fundamental style has been marked by the repetition of characters and phrases painted onto the canvas, through constant reapplication and permutation, the characters are completely obliterated between the brush strokes and colored paints, to the point that the painting is purely a textured color panel. People occasionally term such work as “abstract painting.” These works of Gong Jian, created through the layered repetition of certain key words and phrases, ultimately obstructs from view the words themselves. Perhaps without intention, the work implicitly mirrors the language of media and their method for public dissemination of information, some of which is spread with such speed and magnitude that their meaning is meticulously concealed beneath the layers of information, a phenomenon that began in 2008 and has become increasingly prevalent.
For the artist, however, these paintings simultaneously are concerned more with the relationship in language between writing and image. And as art critic Wang Minan points out, when Gong Jian pulls writing into his paintings, a tense relationship takes shape between language and image in his writings. The script of the formed language represents a collection of cultural and political standards, each character stroke obeying a system of organisation. Through writing, Gong Jian in one regard brings language into the flesh, each stroke passive in its execution. Yet when the accumulation of writing reaches a certain degree, both the written language and system crumble, thereby transforming the work into an image. Within this obsessive compulsive system of writing, phrases are erased by phrases, and in the space between the presence and absence of language the image is born.
In these written works, the layered and repeatedly written phrases include such phrases and words as taciturn, ire, landscapes, using flash cover, she blocked my new body, enormous, protest, you should learn how to wait, temperatures are rising, Al-Qaida, the European Union, world suffering is just the beginning, nothing is important, ancestors in the heavens overlooked, the future of the petty bourgeoisie shaking before their eyes, too yuppie, China and 30 other verbs.
Nothing Is Important
1 June – 20 July, 2012
Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Nothing Is Important”, a solo exhibition by Gong Jian showcasing 30 works of art dating back to 2010, to open May 31, 2012.
The exhibition title “It’s Not Important” is Gong Jian’s first solo exhibition following the 2008 transformation of his paintings. Throughout the past few years, Gong Jian’s fundamental style has been marked by the repetition of characters and phrases painted onto the canvas, through constant reapplication and permutation, the characters are completely obliterated between the brush strokes and colored paints, to the point that the painting is purely a textured color panel. People occasionally term such work as “abstract painting.” These works of Gong Jian, created through the layered repetition of certain key words and phrases, ultimately obstructs from view the words themselves. Perhaps without intention, the work implicitly mirrors the language of media and their method for public dissemination of information, some of which is spread with such speed and magnitude that their meaning is meticulously concealed beneath the layers of information, a phenomenon that began in 2008 and has become increasingly prevalent.
For the artist, however, these paintings simultaneously are concerned more with the relationship in language between writing and image. And as art critic Wang Minan points out, when Gong Jian pulls writing into his paintings, a tense relationship takes shape between language and image in his writings. The script of the formed language represents a collection of cultural and political standards, each character stroke obeying a system of organisation. Through writing, Gong Jian in one regard brings language into the flesh, each stroke passive in its execution. Yet when the accumulation of writing reaches a certain degree, both the written language and system crumble, thereby transforming the work into an image. Within this obsessive compulsive system of writing, phrases are erased by phrases, and in the space between the presence and absence of language the image is born.
In these written works, the layered and repeatedly written phrases include such phrases and words as taciturn, ire, landscapes, using flash cover, she blocked my new body, enormous, protest, you should learn how to wait, temperatures are rising, Al-Qaida, the European Union, world suffering is just the beginning, nothing is important, ancestors in the heavens overlooked, the future of the petty bourgeoisie shaking before their eyes, too yuppie, China and 30 other verbs.