Artists: Chen Shaoxiong, Liu Ding.
Artists’ Statement:
Project Without Space, (2010-2012), is an on-going joint project by Chen Shaoxiong (b. 1962 Guangdong Province) and Liu Ding (b. 1976 Jiangsu Province), and will occur in various physical spaces following various conceptual frameworks, and is based on our shared aesthetic experiences. Our latest two-artist iteration (#6) of “Project Without Space”, will engage your eyes in whatever forms or in whatever states you can or cannot imagine. In this, our 6th project cooperation, we each produced a series of paintings, each work comprised of either a combination of designs from various schools of Modernist art or patterns from primitive art objects. These artistic forms, standing for different spiritual and aesthetic pursuits, are juxtaposed within the same frame, in a somewhat conflicting hybrid of lines, brushworks, colours, techniques, individual tastes, and spirits.
The audience, depending on their prior aesthetic orientation, can distinguish one part of the painting from another, but cannot classify or make judgments on these co-produced paintings according to any existing standard of analyzing artwork. As art co-producers, our choice of patterns, the pictorial composition, our exchange of ideas, and the final outcome, are all based on this particular mode of two-artist idea exchange and deliberation.
Eager to share how these works are produced, we hope these works can be appreciated as rational and logical paintings. This required us to keep questioning ourselves closely on every choice we made, reflecting on and sharing the basis of our choices: How indeed are our paintings created? Such reflective and questioning efforts will surely help us to penetrate our aesthetics, including our knowledge base, historical background, experience and value judgments, as well as our ideologies. “What underlies the pictorial experience and orientation?” This question, as both art creators and art viewers, is ultimately, critical to our investigation.
