Solo Show – Ship of Fools Zheng Hong Xiang Solo Show

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Duration

20th May (Thur) – 12th June (Sat), 2021

VIP Preview

7PM, 20th May (Thur) , 2021

Public Opening (Guided Tour)

3PM, 22nd May (Sat), 2021

Address

Rm 608, 6/F, Innovation Park, Smart Cube, No.4 Hongmian Road, Futian Bonded Area, Futian District, Shenzhen

Curatorial Statement

 

The Dragon Year Gallery is delighted to announce that the artist Zheng Hong Xiang (b. 1983) will be featured in our first show in 2021 and we will present his work in the second solo exhibition in our Shenzhen space. Some of his works on paper have been presented to our collectors in his first physical show at our gallery in Shenzhen at the end of 2019. The solo exhibition will turn our focus back to the oil paintings of the artist by presenting some of his important works during 2014-2016 juxtaposed with some of his newest pieces. The show aims to build up a continuum on Zheng’s art practice and further expand Zheng’s curatorial narrative into a new context.

 

 

Zheng Hong Xiang, now based in Beijing, graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s degree in 2013. His undergraduate study was in the Department of Oil Painting of Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, one of the top eight art academies in China and famous for its high standards in training. Zheng’s works have been exhibited all over the world including Paris and Los Angeles as one representative of young emerging artists from China. The artist also has had his solo hosted in many cities of China. The recent shows include Scratch the Surface, supported by GOME Art Foundation, was held in Beijing at the end of 2019. Some art books of his different creative periods have also been published.

 

 

 

 

 

There seems to be a tinge of sarcasm prevailing in his works. In Stagnant Dreams, the boat on a black grassland implying that intention. Although the situation could remind people of the difficult position that is the same case in the film Fitzcarraldo by Herzog in which the protagonist was trying to transport a steamship over a steep hill, the passenger’s spaceman-style cloth, the blinders covering his eyes as well as his being accompanied by a group of swans reveals a somewhat absurd, or more precisely, self-deceiving scenario. The imagery of swans, white spheres and astronauts appears frequently in Zheng’s work. The hanging spheres aligning in the air insert more tension into his tableau. The boat was transformed into a medium carrying the objects that normally are not supposed to appear in this scene, making the work more as an allegory with narratives to be unscrambled. The swan, an animal totem representing beauty, grace, purity, holiness and devotion, all relate to a lofty nature. Ironically, these animals that are capable of flying are trapped together with a dreaming spaceman.

 

 

 

Michel Foucault took “ship” as a typical Heterotopia, a concept conceived as a new spatial type: the Heterotopia, a term that comes from medicine originally referring to the displacement of an organ or part of the body from its normal position. The boat in Stagnant Dreams could be a perfect metaphorical entity for “Heterotopia”, containing a spatial and temporal heterogeneity both internally and externally. Imageries permeated with symbolic aura are painted just as they are collaged from different sources. Where are the passengers from and where will they go? The protagonist chooses to turn to his dreams while the boat is stagnate, stuck in the grass. The boat itself has many possibilities for meaning. Foucault regarded ships as a perfect example of heterotopia because each ship, navigating between lands, represents disorder but also infinite possibilities and potentials.

 

 

 

“…you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,1967

 

Actually there exists a famous allegory called Ship of Fools in western culture. It is a ship carrying a dysfunctional crew, originating from Book VI of Plato’s Republic. Many artworks have been made on the theme, one of them being a painting from Hieronymus Bosch, who was probably inspired by the 15th-century book Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant. The passengers are the people who are judged as physically or mentally ill and become exiled to a ship drifting on the sea eternally as no countries would accept them. The loss of direction or the constant state of transition makes the people indulge in pleasure and reveal all kinds of evilness in humanity. The “fools” literally define a status similar to that of the protagonist in Zheng’s painting who is undergoing the self-deceptive action of dreaming when the boat runs aground.

 

 

 

Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500), Hieronymus Bosch(c. 1450 – 1516)

Interestingly enough, there is also an imaginary boat in Chinese culture.

 

 

The old saying is that the Milky Way connects with the ocean. In recent times, people living at the seaside notice a floating raft appear in August every year. A person who has strange ambitions…….take a ride on that raft. For more than ten days, he still could watch the stars and the moon but after that he got lost in time and space.

——Zhang Hua (Western Jin Dynasty)

 

 

 

Arhats On A RaftLi Gonglin (1049–1106),

Northern Song Dynasty

 

 

 

 

Literally speaking, the object is rather a raft than a boat. The name Fu Cha means a log raft floating on the sea that would finally connect with Heaven (the Milky Way). In the book Encyclopaedic Narration written by Zhang Hua from the Western Jin Dynasty, the raft would shuttle between the sea and the Milky Way in August each year. The mythological raft represents one aspect of the ancient interpretation of the natural world and people’s desire to explore the unknown world. In traditional Chinese culture, the imagery was further established as a schema encompassing a group of meanings ranging from the mythical imagination of the fairyland, literati’s aloof gesture from politics and material pursuits or even a blessing for longevity in folk culture. It is not only prevalent in text but also becomes a popular pattern in painting and handicrafts. The knowledge network was further expanded by the treatment of this raft in contemporary art when the motif was associated with immigration and other modern issues. Zheng’s work Stagnant Dreams, portraying the astronaut drifting in the boat, could also be treated as the contemporary re-imagination of the ancient Chinese symbol of the cosmic raft. The scenario the artist designed for the passengers indicates that the destination of the boat must be the great sky but they got stuck in an awkward position on their way there.

 

 

 

The imagery of boats or other kinds of floating carriers haunt throughout the development of the artist’s allegory. Zheng has seemingly devoted himself to chiselling out other spaces on the canvas where the protagonists could either reside, transit or simply extend themselves from. The boat, or more precisely, the vessel, be it a red boat drifting on grassland, a red doghouse flying in the air or even just a floating iron circle, in red color, too, all seem to be detached from a normal background and isolated in the space of the canvas, which perfectly fits the definition of the term Heterotopia.

 

It is often a pairing of a human and an animal who coexist in the space within the canvas. The audience is lured to imagine the silent conversation between the human being and the animal and furthermore to contemplate on the issues of humanity, animality and the area where they may overlap. In Double Side where the young man faces a rhinoceros, one kind of endangered species. The rhinoceros wears a rhinoceros-like hat on his head and a rope held in the man’s hand that establishes a connection between the two. Getting trapped in a strange space himself, the protagonist seems to have lost himself (sometimes manifested as blocked vision) and is searching for the answer with the help of the animals. The inner beings of the protagonist were projected from within through the tensions between the two parties. What’s more, it also alludes to a shared crisis of identity faced by all human beings in the Anthropocene era when human activities have profoundly influenced the geometry of the planet.

 

 

The void atmosphere emanating from the paintings adds another layer to Zheng’s satire. Being extraordinarily rich and complex in narrative, the works’ temporal and spatial coordinates, however, are quite vague and abstract. The representational metaphors are folded into a fuzzy space-time, making the satire more like a self-reflexive irony or a self-mockery black comedy of human beings as a whole.

 

 

DA DA!, Zheng Hong Xiang, Oil on Canvas, 2016

 

 

The heterogeneity rendering the rejective tensions between the imageries in the artist’s works has somehow verified the validity of another inspiration for Zheng, that is DADA. Zheng obviously inherited the method of collage and appropriation from this art movement that could be traced back to the early 20th century. He even paints two bold words “DADA” covering the heads of the figures in DA DA!. Aside from the techniques of introducing non-art objects such as newspapers, it is rather the spirit of randomness and anti-prevalence held by Dadaism that is embraced more thoroughly by the artist. Taking references from the ongoing reality and weaving the elements into his allegory, the artist seems to indicate that the revisit to the core spirit of DADA is to reject prevailing order. This exploration of the core spirit of DADA is still needed and even more urgent in the contemporary world. The complicated allegory could only be articulated with the aid of superb painting skills, allowing the artist to be more flexible and creative in revealing his conception.

 

 

With the contemporary world becoming more sophisticated with new things being generated in a higher velocity and frequency, Zheng’s allegory system is also expected to be more complicated with new narrative relevant to fluctuating reality. Just as the ancient Chinese imagined a log raft in order to explain some of their inner desire toward the unknown world and the Western world came up with the ship of fools floating outside normal societies, Zheng’s task is to provide an artistic methodology for people to interpret the mysterious and unspeakable parts in our reality from a new perspective.

 

 

As an accomplished painter and a prolific painter, Zheng’s art language keeps progressing by ceaselessly absorbing new elements into the tableau. Every shift of the creation is not a sudden deviation but a slight turn, making the portfolio more like a vast body of allegories with intertextual relationship between the works of his different creative periods. By juxtaposing Zheng’s works 4-5 years ago with the newest creations, we are not only trying to zoom in on the allegories active in Zheng’s mind but also curating a new chapter with new narratives.

 

 

The show is presented with a comprehensive set of curation straddling over both online and offline. A 3D virtual Museum was created for the artist with a different curatorial approach. An online viewing room based on the real shots of the physical show will also be opened to facilitate more visitors. In the offline show we set up sound installation and video installation as a curatorial technique that echos the artworks. The experiences are curated, layered and constructed for the audience to play with. (Written by: Wang Jingyu)