Yuzheng Cheng "Liebe Grusse"
20 Oct - 30 Nov 2006
Yuzheng Cheng “Liebe Grüße”
20 October - 30 November 2006
Private view: Friday 20 October 2006
Gallery Hours: 11am to 3pm - 5-8pm Tuesday-Friday, 12 - 4pm Saturday
Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of the Chinese artist Yuzheng Cheng. Yuzheng Cheng was born in Shuzou in 1977 and studied painting at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK) under professor K.H. Hoedicke.
Yuzheng Cheng calls a series of paintings “Landscapes” in which he has a critical look at mass media’s images of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq. Without giving a definite judgment his works are about the understanding of these images from a painter’s point of view. He assembles and spreads wide panoramas or tightens the composition in a single motif. Against the common pictures of war Cheng sets up the irritating frightlessness of calm and fair painting. Mostly his landscapes are painted with a top view. In Chinese painting this peculiar viewing from a higher point is called “ flat distance” that puts the beholder in a elementary way in front of the painting. For the smaller works frontality and exemptness of the motifs take over this function. The pictures are painted harshly and combine Asian set-up with European gesture. The figures are painted without faces that might be reminiscent of a sentence by the artist Kuo Hsi (1020-1090): “Far away people have no eyes”.
In the current exhibition with the title “Liebe Grüße” (Best Wishes) Cheng presents paintings in big and smaller size. He collects images from the flee- market, like old postcards from the 50s to the 70s with images from German landscapes as the Blackforest, etiquettes from consuming products etc. In these paintings of cigarette packs, egg boxes or a most common Chinese-German dictionary Cheng transforms the ‘thingness’ of these things according to the ‘thingness of a painting’. His adjustment of the different three-dimensional shapes to the inherent laws of the picture plane may seem vulgar opposed to traditional portraiture, but Cheng achieves intense effects with this ‘thing-portraits’ – always trying to bring the gleams of time into his pictures.
In his most recent paintings Cheng has started to work with picture-postcards of popular places one spends his holidays at. These motifs carry the fascination for the unknown and idyllic longings that cause irritation in the beholder’s eye. Questioning the clichés of the banal holiday-cards in pictures like “Grüße aus dem Schwarzwald” (best wishes from the Blackforest) he breaks up the motif’s flatness: Calm waters painterly become mysteriously moved forces of nature and mountains again appear as ‘real’ mountains – thus in “Altmünster am Traunsee” (Altmuenster near the lake Traun) one does not only see the simple height of the mountain (1691m), but is – as in all great landscape-painting – confronted even more profundly with its actual highness.
Therefore recedence, dissimilarity and uncertainty characterize Chengs’s works; every painting depicts a deformational necessity through its entry into the specific dimensions of the pictorial. Whilst Cheng breaks down the visual and brings it back into place in a transformed way he shatters all those things without saying by the emptiness of their representation. He questions the elementary means of painting and in accordance with the pictorial his paintings enable a clearer view of the real world by turning it into a painterly reality.
20 October - 30 November 2006
Private view: Friday 20 October 2006
Gallery Hours: 11am to 3pm - 5-8pm Tuesday-Friday, 12 - 4pm Saturday
Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of the Chinese artist Yuzheng Cheng. Yuzheng Cheng was born in Shuzou in 1977 and studied painting at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK) under professor K.H. Hoedicke.
Yuzheng Cheng calls a series of paintings “Landscapes” in which he has a critical look at mass media’s images of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq. Without giving a definite judgment his works are about the understanding of these images from a painter’s point of view. He assembles and spreads wide panoramas or tightens the composition in a single motif. Against the common pictures of war Cheng sets up the irritating frightlessness of calm and fair painting. Mostly his landscapes are painted with a top view. In Chinese painting this peculiar viewing from a higher point is called “ flat distance” that puts the beholder in a elementary way in front of the painting. For the smaller works frontality and exemptness of the motifs take over this function. The pictures are painted harshly and combine Asian set-up with European gesture. The figures are painted without faces that might be reminiscent of a sentence by the artist Kuo Hsi (1020-1090): “Far away people have no eyes”.
In the current exhibition with the title “Liebe Grüße” (Best Wishes) Cheng presents paintings in big and smaller size. He collects images from the flee- market, like old postcards from the 50s to the 70s with images from German landscapes as the Blackforest, etiquettes from consuming products etc. In these paintings of cigarette packs, egg boxes or a most common Chinese-German dictionary Cheng transforms the ‘thingness’ of these things according to the ‘thingness of a painting’. His adjustment of the different three-dimensional shapes to the inherent laws of the picture plane may seem vulgar opposed to traditional portraiture, but Cheng achieves intense effects with this ‘thing-portraits’ – always trying to bring the gleams of time into his pictures.
In his most recent paintings Cheng has started to work with picture-postcards of popular places one spends his holidays at. These motifs carry the fascination for the unknown and idyllic longings that cause irritation in the beholder’s eye. Questioning the clichés of the banal holiday-cards in pictures like “Grüße aus dem Schwarzwald” (best wishes from the Blackforest) he breaks up the motif’s flatness: Calm waters painterly become mysteriously moved forces of nature and mountains again appear as ‘real’ mountains – thus in “Altmünster am Traunsee” (Altmuenster near the lake Traun) one does not only see the simple height of the mountain (1691m), but is – as in all great landscape-painting – confronted even more profundly with its actual highness.
Therefore recedence, dissimilarity and uncertainty characterize Chengs’s works; every painting depicts a deformational necessity through its entry into the specific dimensions of the pictorial. Whilst Cheng breaks down the visual and brings it back into place in a transformed way he shatters all those things without saying by the emptiness of their representation. He questions the elementary means of painting and in accordance with the pictorial his paintings enable a clearer view of the real world by turning it into a painterly reality.