Please join us in the gallery on Saturday December 15th at 4PM for an ARTIST TALK with LIANG Weizhou. He will be speaking about the creative process behind his newest body of work, “Post-Jiangnan”, featured recently in the Financial Times, and on view in the gallery until January 6. The artist will also sign copies of the newly published “Post-Jiangnan” catalogue.
[PRESS RELEASE]
M97 Gallery is pleased to present “Post-Jiangnan”, an exhibition of artist LIANG Weizhou’s newest photographs, works on paper and unique vintage photographs from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The Shanghainese painter and professor, best known over the past twenty years for his expressionist and surrealist paintings, has been gaining critical acclaim and exposure for his ongoing body of photography-based works. The exhibition will be on view until 2013 January 6. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.
LIANG Weizhou’s new body of landscape photographs was made in the surrounding provinces in and around Shanghai known as the Jiangnan region south of the Yangtze River. These large-format explorations of the traditionally refined water towns and countryside depict China’s industrialization and post-industrialization developments. Creating unique works in a size and scale traditionally used for works on canvas (150cm x 190cm) the photographs haunt and overpower the viewer with their immense gravity and detail. LIANG Weizhou likens his artistic process to that of classical painters sketching scenes in the countryside to later be rendered as works on canvas in the studio. The colored and painted elements in LIANG Weizhou’s black and white compositions create an abstracted, seemingly almost surreal viewing distance from the reality depicted in the photographs that evokes greater contemplation and emotion in the scenes. Working with large-format black and white film, the artist captures stunning layers of detail in each composition and later revives each scene from memory, rendering and interpreting the elements back to a point where the viewer can both access the reality of the scene as well as contemplate the work on a more synthesized, interpreted level, a visual rendering positioned literally between the subjective expression of a painting and the powerful realism inherent in the photograph.
LIANG Weizhou’s photographic works are a direct extension of his formal roots in painting. Having developed a clear visual language of interweaving his painting aesthetics and techniques with his thirty year practice of photography, the continuing theme and subject matter of his works is the often isolated and existential elements of ordinary life in Shanghai and the surrounding regions. Shanghai having once been the industrial center of China during the artist’s childhood, the opening and reforms post 1980’s, has seen more development and industry move outside the now cosmopolitan urban centers and into what once were bucolic rural towns and villages. Despite the lack of human subjects, LIANG Weizhou’s works are profound reflections and documents of the circumstances and realities found in the inner and outer world across Chinese society.
