Ephemeral Silhouette

2024.05.25 - 2024.06.29

Artist: Liu Wenqi, Li Changpeng, Xie Lingrou, Zhou Xinyu

Curator: Wang Haoyang

​

「Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.

Over many a quint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“Tis some visitor , I muttered,” Tapping at my chamber door—

     Only this, and nothing more.」

                                                                                                          —— by Edgar Allen Poe The Raven

​

Cub_ism_ Artspace is pleased to announce the group exhibition with artists Liu Wenqi, Li Changpeng, Xie Lingrou and Zhou Xinyu. There are countless scenes that are deeply remembered by people, and these fragmental memories are all personal and transient. In retrospect, these fragments seem to be only a vague outline afterimage, so what will be left until the end? In this group exhibition, four artists used their fragmentary images in as a montage to depict the ephemeral silhouette. Exhibition is from 25 May to 29 June.

​

As the beginning excerpt, referenced from Edgar's poem, poet only use a few sentences can lead the readers into a gloomy and dreary night. Through artists’ paintings, viewers can step into artists’ perspective just by a glance. Artists' languages are different from traditional written expressions or oral records; they are as beholders to transform what they see through their own thinking process and recreate it in a specific medium. If people only focus on the action of "watching", maybe this is a bit lackluster, but the interesting thing about the painting is that the sequel written which extends from the edges can always surprise people.

​

“Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject had one been see by other people.”

                                                                                                                                   —— Ways of Seeing

People always get the artists’ first impression by "viewing" their works. Maybe they will be curious about how do artists observe the world? In this exhibition, the four artists derive the ideas from a segment in their memories. It is the reflection existed in life, or it may be recreated of secondary processing.

 

Social media is the mainstream way for people in the Z generation to obtain information.Artist Li Changpeng extracts and symbolizes the images in the information flow. Those everyday "happy" symbols in the images seem to be detached after being processed in monochrome. While looking at the paintings, viewers’ inherent cognition creates new thoughts through these detached still-life. Liu Wenqi uses ceramics as a comparison to depict vivid light and subtle shadow. In the paintings, viewers can easily identify leaves shadow or a corner, but the artist's blurry the surface and zoom-in view lead the viewers imagine and complete the entire scene. What the artist wants to emphasize is the perception of things rather than the appearance of itself. Figurations and objects are two clues in artist Zhou Xinyu’s painting experience. In this exhibition, people will notice that Xinyu seems to diminish the boundaries between the organism and the inorganic substance. In her paintings, some main objects were expressed separately, while in the other paintings’ they were juxtaposed in the same surface but situated in a limbo space and generate into a new picture. Xie Lingrou's works contain images from reality and the memories are buried under the dust. These images regenerate from living and inanimate objects. They have been rewritten and layered by artists, finding a unique balance in between virtual world and reality, concreteness and abstraction. The emotions dispersed in her paintings are soft and full of vitality.
 

Nowadays, there are many ways for artists to obtain pictures, such as the scenes they observe with the eyes or photography works in electronic devices, etc. Sometimes they are no longer in the first perspective, actually the pictures are recreated and stored in their mind in a particular atmosphere. Although the creation of photographic images broke the uniqueness of images - people can view the same image in various places at the same time. It is artists that have the ability to create the pictures twice and transform them into their own unique expressions. Unlike with the tradition cognition, the artworks in this exhibition allow everyone to rethink the ways of "seeing".