A solo exhibition of artist Zhang Xinjun, “Folds”, is set to open in Gallery Yang on April 25, 2015, and will last until June 7, 2015.
The installation works of the artist relate to space. He described with “diaphragm” the objects or spaces he produced. “Diaphragm” separates and blurs object and space. A geological term, folds, is used by the artist to refer to both the appearances formed by the counteraction between internal movement and the outer wall, and the conflict of the composer’s internal states and his works. Zhang Xinjun, after being graduated from the oil painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, got a master degree in CAFA. In the artistic practice of that period, he had doubts of uncertainty about the sense of distance between painting and human body. He felt constrained within the coordinative techniques of consciousness and experience. The physical consumption of body or the experiences of laboring led to his abandoning the drift of consciousness; he came to be closer to the natural movement and action. He often undertakes his expressions in a clumsy and coarse way, without polishing and covering up the flaws and traces of artificial production, which come to be another part of naturalness of the work. The unstableness is one of the traits of Zhang Xinjun’s works. There is an implicit fear for stableness in his installation works in which spaces are correlated with each other by threads and ropes. Off the scene, the works were often folded and packed to conceal themselves; and the display of them often quietly comes and goes. Human body is for him a movable object, sustaining in the repetitive transformations of energy; it is a “diaphragm” between the inside and outside, decaying into and remaining in the medium of materials in the process of energy consumption. By his works of performance and installation, the artist records the connections of individual and environment in time and space, and the “folds” formed in the conflict of the fluid movement and the solid outer wall.
This exhibition in Gallery Yang has two parts. The main body displayed in the hall came from an object or space the artist casually obtained, which was enlarged proportionally by methods of mathematics and geometry. Being dragged by ropes, it holds its foot slowly so as to become another object or a new space. In the small display room are exhibited the videos and photographs of his other works related to the theme of “folds”, one of which is “Drawer Man”.
