osage kwun tong: extended to 23.11.2008

:: Jiang Zhi: On The White

Curated by Isabel Ching

ON THE WHITE is Jiang Zhi's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. It is an introspective examination of confrontation, entanglement, coexistence and contradictions. A male and a female body move under the white cloth. Rather than emphasizing gender difference, the bodies seem to be governed by mystical force and tension, indicating a sort of yin/yang co-dependence that underlies the basis of life. Indistinct forces are shown to be at work, intimating what is experienced and felt rather than theorized or verbalized. The white cloth manifests a fluid form and visual/conceptual ambiguity from which can arise intuition, direct insights and a nuanced understanding that approaches the truth.

Jiang Zhi: On The White continues until 23 November 2008


Osage Gallery Contacts

Hong Kong

Osage Soho
45 Caine Road, Lower Ground Shop 1, Corner Old Bailey Street, Soho, Central, Hong Kong [Street Map]
TEL : (852) 2537-0688
FAX : (852) 3007-2988
EMAIL : info@osagegallery.com
Mon - Sat : 10:30 am - 7:30 pm
Sun & Public Holidays : 12:00 noon - 5:00 pm

Jiang Zhi


Jiang Zhi was born in 1971 in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province, China, and graduated in 1995 from the China Academy of Fine Art. He has exhibited widely including “The 5th International Ink Painting Biennial of Shenzhen” (He Xiangning Museum of Art, Shenzhen, 2006), “All Look Same? / Tutttguale?”, Art China Korea Japan Art ( Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Via Modane 16, Turin, Italy, 2006), “La rivoluzione siamo noi” (Isola Art Centre, Milano, Italy, 2006, “China Power Station Part 1” (Battersea Power Station, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK, 2006), “Fribourg International Film Festival”, Fribourg, Switzerland, “Double Rooms” (Zhu Qizhan Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2006), “Micrology: the Politics of Realism—A Case of Chinese Contemporary Art” (Centro Cultural de Macau, 2006), “The 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival” (Hong Kong, China, 2005), “The 2nd Guangzhou Triennial of Art”, (Guangdong Art Museum, China, 2005), “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China” (ICP and Asia Society, New York, 2004), “Shanghai Biennale—Techniques of the Visible” (Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2004), “Z.O.U. – Zone of Urgency, The 50th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia” (Venice, Italy, 2003) and “The 4th Gwangiu Biennale Exhibition” (Gwangiu, South Korea, 2002).

curator and the author of Isabel Ching


Isabel Ching AND OSAGA art advisor Jonathan Thomson
























video


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Osage Gallery Profile

Osage is a dynamic international gallery group that was established in 2004 with exhibition spaces in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore.

The galleries are dedicated to the exhibition, promotion and development of contemporary Asian artists, art and ideas.

Our exhibition philosophy explores four broad themes:

‧ Art of Ideas aims to bring to the art world new voices, new vision, new ideas and new styles.
‧ Art of Communication aims to present art that spurs the imagination and which works at a level of intensity that offers various and sometimes even radical experience.
‧ Art of Understanding includes work that at times addresses local and national concerns, work that addresses universal themes that go beyond mere national concerns and work that celebrates diversity and difference.
‧ Art of Engagement aims to present work that is a celebration of the achievements of humanity together with its limitations and failures.

The exhibition programs, education programs and outreach activities all provide a platform for artists and audiences to engage with cultural and creative ideas. The exhibitions are supported by a publications program which helps make the art work more accessible to a wider range of audiences.

The Gloomy Wonderland that Ceaselessly Interchanges with Reality
– On Jiang Zhi’s Solo Exhibition “Above the White”
Fu Xiaodong

In this exhibition, we bid farewell to the Jiang Zhi who is filled with fantasies, touching on sociological investigation, unveiling realistic metaphors, and encounter this Jiang Zhi who is beyond time, illusory, dreamy, melancholic, but still neurotically sexy. Art no longer serves as a media carrying any information, but becomes a kind of breath instead. It is like there are two Jiang Zhi(s) taking turns to appear in the works signed by Jiang Zhi. Of course, maybe there is a third Jiang Zhi existing in some other space, who was created by words.

1. Ambiguous duality: On the White, Corner, Sleepless shows the transfiguration in separation, entanglement, struggle, and mer’gence. Enshrouded by white gauze, the difference between man and woman becomes ambiguous and inexplicit. The duality of it is sublimed, blended and made vague, just like the concealment and illusion he had created with white mist. Definite depression and sexual fantasy become invalid here.

2. Sexual act: The function of male and female genitals is replaced by dance posts here. It’s been upgraded from a satisfaction of needs with practical value to economic exchange value. It becomes a set of erotic symbols that could be publicly circulated in the visual system, as well as an ideal sample of negating gender. Every intersection, combination and transformation become the metaphor of a kind of legitimate relationship between man and woman, a kind of visual combination, and a type of show that could be opened to the public.

3. Strip dance: A successful strip dance is not about sexual intercourse with the audience. Instead, it creates a taboo around itself. It is a subtle vanity, with some distance from physical desire, a perfect abstraction, a holy, inviolable and sealed nude. The shallow nude on the beach could only carries class ranking of social plutonomy, but the delicate yet elaborate subject in Sleepless is the avoidance, camouflage and concealment of realism and naturalism, which acquires a kind of poetic significance. The slow rhythm of strip dancing seems like fireworks in slow motion. The Beginning of the Universe brings a poetic and slow descent. It is a divine hypothesis, which gives you time to imagine and leap before its completion. It keeps switching between two worlds, the reality and the wonderland.

4. Transparent gauze: “You are more naked than natural in black silk stockings.” Closed and smooth white gauze enshrouding the naked body, with no rupture, no thrum, no interface and no flaw. Thus the nude becomes semi-transparent, perfect, asexual, smooth, and depilated. The gauze clings to the body, transformed into the second layer of skin, becoming closed off, a transparent glass-like membrane existing in abstract perpetuity. The transparent gauze becomes the holy aura of the body, a perfect body that is self-content and self-idolizing, which gives rise to the gloomy wonderland.

5. Rumples: The fabric in the work presents a kind of silver Baroque rumples. They are concrete , flexuous, continuous, pervasive, ambiguous, with multiple sides, and extend to eternity. They separate the closeness and liberation, internal and external, as well as truth and appearance. The rumples’ uneven structure filled the whole picture in a single color block with subtle changes of tone. There are endless vertical cloth curtains, the rumples covering the nude bodies signifying structure, just like shadow of a secret spirit point casted upon the material. They merge and vibrate in the white trance, just like an illusion from drugs, or the “rumples of sleep” described by Deleuze.

6. Phallus: The concept of “Phallus” introduced by Lacan is not the “penis” of Freud’s “castration complex”. Phallus provides the reason for desire, which is the absence of language. If desire is the metonymy of the existence of absence, then the self could be the metonymy of desire. Human desire comes from the unconsciousness of the Other’s desire. Castration corresponds with the deficiency of capacity that humans can imagine but are not able to realise. The multiple curtains and spaces, white walls, the emptiness inside the space, imply castration at a deeper spiritual level. It was called “essence” by Proust, which could be considered as the stalwart, lost and frustrated fear and expression of self- absence.

7. Death: In The Constantly Reaffirming External World, the lens of Jiang Zhi focused on the corners of everyday life. With tones approximating black and white, it methodically restores a flash of nervous confusion under conditions of detention when isolated from the outside space. A black gauze curtain with glimmering light brings vital imagination. “I would exit alone in the festival, with no aspiration in this colorful and joyful world.” (Victor, Hugo) Fireworks become a partially presented material like decomposed light. The slow and scattered light spots become a kind of dissipation, dismemberment, and destruction of material. Instead of reminding people about the birth of the universe like the title The Beginning of the Universe, it is more proclaiming the vanishing or demolition of death. Just like the “six as” in the philosophy of oriental Buddhism, as bubble, as dream, as mist, as dew, as shadow, as lightning. Death no longer serves as the opposite of life, instead, it becomes this impulse of nirvana, an ultimate goal of life, a liberation of desire, and an Utopia of freedom. The end of every life is death, and the death of non-life exists before life. The other side of outside is the inside, being ceaselessly reaffirmed, but never completely duplicated, to let go of what is past, allowing us to appreciate the zen in “the riptide-like mind of humans.”