Opening: July 4th, 2015 16:00-19:00
Exhibition Dates: July 4th – August 15th, 2015
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00AM-18:00PM
Artists:
Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Yujun, Fang Lu, Feng Guodong, Gade, Gong Jian, Guo Haiqiang, Huang Rui, Ji Lei, Kang Wanhua, Li Shan, Li Shuang, Liao Guohe, Ma Kelu, Ma Yanhong, MAP Office, Ou Jin, Qiu Anxiong, Song Kun, Tang Pinggang, Tang Song, Wang Wei, Xie Zhengli, Xue Feng, Yang Xinguang, Zhan Rui, Zhang Peili, Zhang Wei
Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to present the summer group exhibition “Text, Pause” on July 4, 2015. This exhibition aims to establish the dichotomous relationship between narrative text and the medium of language, and the artists’ visual extensions through language, material, narrative mode and given contexts have discovered new paths in the various media the artworks manifest.
Text is a linguistic mode and medium for communication, meaning and narration, even once its superficial meaning is removed, it may still be found in certain decipherable contexts. “What to say and how to say it” suggest certain power as it approaches a standardized narrative, and thus, projecting a certain political position. The flexibility in the presentation of language allows language to transcend the textual reference to a social context, and as a language that can be narrated and disseminated, it also carries a visual form, based on these mantics, imagery and the writing qualities, engendering new understanding and narrative relations.
From the perspective of artistic methology, the inquiry into the questions produced inthe deconstruction and image restoration of the semantics and forms within the language, the focus on textual language should be considered within the process of cultural and social process. Moreover, due to the differences in dissemination and consumption of the artistic media, art may not provide the path of interpretation or skepticism. This group exhibition questions the singularity of language as it has been placed on a commonly sharing platform in today’s seemingly open, sublimated yet respectable realm. The exhibition reveals issues derived from the visuality, discourse and writing of text through the artists’ intervention in various media – through the use of interpretive… this is also a satire on the plethora of theories. Here the image becomes the performative response to text, without simply being inclined to its visuality.
While the abstract works of Zhang Wei, Ma Kelu, Feng Guodong provide a calligraphic quality to text, their pursuit of imagery further deconstructs text, restoring text to its pictorial origin and its relationship between “image” and form; Zhang Peili’s work Standardized Translation provokes the issue of new judgment in the coerced standard of the digital era.
If language is lowered to common understanding, then both artist Wang Wei and Liao Guohe’s work share this quality on the surface, while their difference is, Liao Guohe’s paintings adopt the quotidian elements, popular slangs to convey the semantic ambiguity of language through his visual representations, while the texts on his images disrupts the visual message; Wang Wei’s Why, emphasizes on the functionality of text at its inception, the act of viewing as language has lost its initial functionality and propagating context.
This exhibition, “Text, Pause”encompasses artistic interventions in the context of visible and readable texts, and presenting alternative aspects of texts as a mean to semantics.
