Another Ghost

August 23, 2014-September 28, 2014

Liang Yuanwei, Guo Hongwei, He Xiangyu, Christopher Orr, Christoph Weber, Ross Chisholm

 

Text / Lucien Y. Tso

The exhibition “Another Ghost” comprises fascinating works by six contemporary artists—Christopher Orr and Ross Chisholm from the UK, Christoph Weber from Austria, as well as Liang Yuanwei, He Xiangyu, and Guo Hongwei from China. This exhibition attempts to address how artists delve into the deeper significance hidden beneath the physical appearances of things through different ways of exploration and presentation of external visual forms. This approach provides the viewers with access to the artists’ anxiety and aspirations for their self-consciousness.

Liang Yuanwei (b. 1977) draws the floral prints commonly seen on textile fabrics in an iterative manner. Such practice captures the tension of a ceaseless tug-of-war between perception and reality. In Liang’s painting, the relationship between perception and reality is mired in an unresolved and contradictory state. They seem to drift away from each other, yet unable to free themselves from each other’s attachment and entanglement. Guo Hongwei’s (b. 1982) collage work “Editing Series” (2013), reflected his curiosity about the relationship between “forms” and “contents” In “Ms. Oyu” (2014), Guo sampled from the frames of the original film, reorganized their constituent elements, and thereby created an entirely different narrative context in terms of vision, space, and time. The re-editing on the content of images neither increases nor reduces the pieces of information for effective communication. The contribution of this approach is to manifest that the appearances of things are often just the results of serendipitous encounters between forms and sequences. In 2014 his latest series “Everything We Create Is not Ourselves”, He Xiangyu (b. 1986) depicts the oral cavity perceived through his tongue. The uncertainty of human senses brings the conversion among perception, painting and body back to a dynamic process of mutual exploration, a process that helps consciousness and experience transcend the limitations of physical body.

The works by Christopher Orr (b. 1967) not only inherit the charm of traditional European painting, but also grant painting an unprecedented contemporary spectacle. Orr is adept at creating non-real-world scenes with scattered, finely fragmented, and disproportionate images of obscure and dusky hues. He ambiguously attracts the viewers to digest the implications of his works, as if hinting that intricate collusion exists behind the pictorial narratives. Modelling himself on the maestros of classical portrait painting in the eighteenth century such as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), William Hogarth (1697-1764), and Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), Ross Chisholm (b. 1977) attempts to put a contemporary interpretation on the relationships among history, identity, authority, and painting. The exhibited work “Untitled (Gegenstück)” (2012) is one of Christoph Weber (b. 1974) masterpieces. The rough and sharp edge of the cleft perfectly divides the cube into two parts. This division in turn symbolizes the unity in which the two parts simultaneously correspond and belong to each other with a sense of warmth and fondness.