Zheng Xuewu "Meditation" and Gwenn Thomas Exhibiiton
Art Projects International
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In his second exhibition with the gallery, Beijing based artist Zheng Xuewu presents his major work Meditation and folk art inspired Chinese Style Blessing series. Zheng has become celebrated for creating an art of unorthodox methods that is in unique dialogue with quotidian Chinese imagery and characters. Meditation has as its foundation, as do his earlier signature Ink Pieces series, multitudes of characters which are printed on the paper one by one using lead type found by the artist. The artist carefully orchestrates the characters positions and works into the negative spaces, between the characters, by hand; Zheng says he tries "to cancel the meaning of the characters and just use them as pattern." In his Chinese Style Blessing series Zheng reaches into folk traditions to add to his repertoire of mark making techniques and image sources. Zheng uses sprayed paint and paper cutouts as stencils, working the images into colorful arrangements that visually pop-out and fade into dark paper grounds. Each New Year, paper cutouts are put up around families' homes in China; different symbols and images represent different wishes. Offerings in Zheng's Chinese Style Blessing series include the characters for "good luck," "prosperity," "longevity," and "happiness" and, in the same spirit, the symbolic imagery of roosters, flowers, dragons, phoenixes, babies and Mao Zedong.
Gwenn Thomas's recent prints of her Rosette, Song and Echoes series are shown together for the first time. Thomas is well known for her attention to detail, texture and surface quality in her digitally generated canvas work; she has for the last five years been bringing this same keen sensibility to the practice of printmaking. Her most recent series Rosette is a balancing act of the delicate and rough hewn and the precisely patterned and organically derived. Marks which remind of cuts in a stela form a rough circle including, at once, patternings of uneven concentric circles and askew crosses. In the Song series the prints display an arrangement of vertically oriented, variously colored, and isolated brushstroke like forms. The Song II series has similar vertical strokes but here in place of color the printed brushy marks seem, somehow, made of newsprint straight from the daily paper. The Echoes series contains the idea of text, but not text itself. Here, through hands-on manipulation of printing plates, Thomas offers beautifully complicated and textured line work structured, perhaps, after a book page or skeletal architectures.
Media
Schedule
from October 28, 2008 to November 21, 2008