Visiting gallery in 7th May

Today we visited White Cube gallery and a personal studio whose a HK artist. There were 3 persons’s work we saw, and they’re both have strong individuals voice. The common point is, these artist both considered the attitude of the influence of Internet to contemporary art, but they used different form and style to complete their concept.

9x9x9

This exhibition strongly enhance the technology and digital things in our life, the artist used many of digital way to generate her visuals. By collecting data from urban commuting or sounds, the artist generate series of abstract geometrics, which can apparently show the rhythm of data.

The interesting thing is, in her works, geometrics are painted by pasting tapes rather than digital printing. In my view, by this way, the artist increased details on painting, made it not completely flat, hence the digital pattern could show more humanism.

In her works, shapes and colors are organized simply but strongly. The reason simple geometrics can show strong visual, is the hierarchy in form. The artist used dot to break lines up, and these elements created strong contrast.

original state of mind

This artist attempts to express origin feeling and origin self. The main method she drew is spray painting and line elements.

The colors she used can show the female features, warm and young. Though it shows abstraction, I found a common point with 9x9x9 works. This artist used tapes, and it looks been cut and pasted in the canvas, hence I can see this style as the tiny reason in emotional world.

We can see some tapes are overlapping, it shown the intersection of mind, express kind of thinking attitude. In this way, lines pop up from flat painting, and enhanced the hierarchy in composition.

Gordon Cheung’s studio

This series of work is the favorite one I saw today. Gordon Cheung is a base on London artist who’s born in HK. His work show strong eastern character, the techniques he used are absolutely amazing, he even add craft elements and digital elements in painting and combined really well.

We can see, in his painting, some wild strokes and tapes expressed excellent texture and colors. Contrast with these dynamic brushes, we can also see some tiny details in his work, which could show the material of objects, potential meaning even emotional expression.

In his painting, we can see the background is made from English news paper, in his statement, these cut new paper were collaged as pixel, and it could be seen as kind of Western cultural shock to Asian. These fragmented papers have different sizes but be pasted tidyly. Furthermore, the texts on paper are not randomly order, they have aligned frame, so it looks really clean but full of texture (质感）.

Let’s look more details in his painting:

In the last two works, we can see artist enhanced the expression on the texture of water. Reflected Chinese political issues, these houses in landscape represent the problem of aborigines (原住民). Responded to some public project, government forced some people change their home. However, somebody are not glad to do that, so their house could be stay alone. Therefore, the expression of shadow in water, could be seen as sort of contrast between reality and fact. In the process of high-speed development, China made many issues about residence, exaggerate house price, economic bubble. As Cheung said, the texts on background represent the influence of capitalism, in current period, capital and market have full of Chinese society, and we could had lived in this money / information based world. In the last image I pasted, we can see some white square, it can be seen as the blank in transitional Chinese painting, but in this work, blank is made by individual squares which look like pixel. Indeed, as Cheung said, these series of blank represented some deletion (缺失) in Internet, because Chinese government has a serious Internet supervisor system, some ‘negative’ information will be removed from public vision, just like these blank. Such a brilliant idea, I’m really respect him!

Reflection

After looked these works, I thought about own project, how can I use these idea into my work? Except concrete techniques, I should think about concepts at first.

reason and sentiment

Whatever works in 9x9x9 or Original state of mind, they shown kind of sentiment by using colours. Especially in that group of abstraction paintings, colours used to render the atmosphere of painting, and artist used couple of line elements to increase the enrichment of texture and details in image. In my view, these clipped tapes make different visuals with spray painting, hence this contrast could be understood as reason & sentiment. (理性和情绪)

For me, in my digital creation, the expression of sentiment should be more focused on. More perceptual elements should be added in image, for instance, I can add hand-draw pattern into geometrics, use watercolour-liked background to contrast with sharp-edged shapes.

The mix of medium

In Cheung’s works, we can see there are multiply medium he used to draw, such as oil paint, dust, tapes, acrylic. Furthermore, he used new paper with text to create background, and pasted or clipped white card to build blank space in painting, which represent a kind of contemporary style like digital image or Internet-based art genre.

The most inspiration he gave me it’s the method of creating texture. He used wild style on brush, and made dynamic feeling on running horse; He drew blur and curved tiny lines with half-transparency colour to describe the texture of water and the shadow on water, and the spray paint was used to imitate light because of it’s gradient attribute. Therefore, in my 3D work, I would attempt to use couple of materials to create own texture, which made by hand. Then, these hand-made materials could be used as Mapping or BumpMap on 3D object, which could make special visuals.