WORKS

ARTISTS

GALLERY FUNC is presenting its first exhibition in the new space, featuring the work of six young Asian artists working and living in different regions.

The etymology of medium (‘medius’ in Latin), was once defined as ‘in between’, ‘a middle ground’. It was used by Plato to describe a character between a man and god, the intertwined connection between subjective and objective, the constant endeavouring between ideal and reality. The theme of this exhibition originate from this concept, is trying to discuss the entanglement of the artist’s intention in the process of creation, trace the source of past, and the cycle of contradiction between the artist and her artworks.

The representation of images and expression of contexts has been in the centre of art theory, the study of human gaze and artistic hidden intention has a special symbolic meaning: when the artist tries to reproduce the entirety of truth, this overly attempt or this excessively inspiration will turn its origin into nothingness. The task of a artist in this middle ground is full of contradictions and paradoxes. In a sense, looking directly at the "temple of nothingness", flicker in a fleeting moment. These languages curled up inside the soul, they are emotionally written in a self-concealed way, and can only be spoken through silence. Avoiding it is equivalent to choosing the eternal daylight, losing the moonlight and without the night. Compared with the motif of artistic creation, looking for the causal chain is why we are gazing. The artworks in this exhibition are a dangerous compromise between the seemingly non-existent intersections. "A dangerous environment breeds art, and hostility is the mother of invention." (John D. Peters, The Marvelous Clouds)

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Representation and expression are at the expense of the actual existence of objects. The attribute of painting itself is not only representation, it also causes disappearance, and makes certain things have concepts through the dissolution. Compared with solid structures, the space constructed by Chih-Han Yang and the traces of suspended lines by Ji Won Cha, allow us to gain new stability and support from outside reality. Even though this reconstruction is premised on the absence of real-world object parts, this act itself has got rid of the destructive function of representation, and the texture of the painting as a medium is also reflected.

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On a more fundamental level, there is a tacit relationship between gaze and narrative in the order of representation, and what surrounds the picture is the coexistence of various opposite relationships and metaphors. The flexible and compliant forms, are from the imitation of illusions by independent individuals: the recombined still life in Li Jun’s Life Is Falling, the symbols in Ye Danfeng’s Focus, and Xu Suyi’s Arrangement in Blue, Earth, and Ocher, hands movements with signifying relationships are within the page of a book. "The unconscious behaviour of beings, which allows their clear and bright palms to pierce the artificial fortress in which we are imprisoned", "a hand that does not belong to us knocks on the secret door of our intuition." ( Maurice Maeterlinck, Menus proposals: le théâtre )

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Maeterlinck depicts a door that we cannot open, but we could ‘hear the sound behind it’, as if it were a new body that no longer seems human, haunting in Yan Bingqian’s work. Perhaps for us, these invisible noises are the result of the artist’s behavioural composition and the acquisition of a new body. If we cannot see the flow of breeze, and strenuous to conjure up this transparent consciousness, it is still exists in its essential way, and must have its own sound and body to be experienced in our wandering.

Texts by Tingzhi Zhang