Closet Space
2025.03.25 - 2025.03.30
Artist: ZHENG Lanxiong
Curator: Qinru Zhou
We are pleased to announce that we will continue to participate in the 2025 Hong Kong Art Central and will present artist ZHENG Lanxiong’s solo project “Closet Space”at Booth B11.
Closet, the most paradoxical container in human experience, guards privacy while suggesting openness. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard reveals the paradox of closed space: the locking closet guards the secret, while the presence of the locking hole suggests a latent desire to be opened. As a kind of ‘sentimental’ fine furniture, the space of each partition in the closet is at once juxtaposed with the real space and, in a compressed form, holds the fragments of memory excluded from the daily order.
This exhibition opens to the audience Zheng Lanxiong's ‘Closet Space’, in which more than a dozen paintings on board and stone clay are displayed, presenting Zheng Lanxiong's individual memories and artistic explorations. The moment the door opens and closes, the camphor breath wraps around the dust rising from the sunlight, a hidden invitation from the private sphere to the public space.
Zheng Lanxiong's creations continue to be a tug of war between the body and the layers of colours. While the viewer tries to capture the colours of his paintings with their eyes, the images push the perception into the realm of subtle emotions —— the slight uneasiness of the spider crawling over the palm of your hand, the warmth of a hand protecting a candle flame, the pain of an electric current at the moment of a needle piercing the earlobe, the taste of iron licked by the tongue when extracting the wisdom teeth…The visual ambiguity that the image ultimately presents is precisely the native state of the body's experience.
The artist's work is time-consuming and labour-intensive. He is used to using tempera to stack layers on wooden boards, with each layer of colour pigment fixed as an absolute time coordinate at the moment of solidification of the medium; and the pressure of fingerprints and scratches of tools absorbed by the stone clay sculptures during the shaping stage are all endowed with the artist's emotional fluctuations at the moment of creation. Thus, through the presentation of each cabinet, the viewer can see a small piece of the artist's ‘individual experience’, and find a sense of déjà vu in the painting; but in fact, for Zheng Lanxiong, each piece of fragmented memory is only a small piece of himself.
