Press Release
Boers – Li Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Xue Feng‘s new solo exhibition, “Enclosure“, on Saturday, April 27th, 2013. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition in the gallery. The new exhibition brings together paintings as well as installations in the form of a spacial structure of 4 rooms enclosing a broad spectrum of the artistic objects from his studio.
In this exhibition Xue Feng (b.1973 – lives and works in Hangzhou) shows in a rich manner our contemporary mind set towards nature and its politics of artificiality, framed in an articulated vocabulary of both Chinese and western painting traditions. Having been exposed to Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy at an early age, then educated in oil painting in Hangzhou, and later in Germany in western modernistic manners such as Abstract Expressionism, he intertwines both traditions in a fashion that defines him as unique in the Chinese art world. Taking Hangzhou’s reputation as a city opulent with culture and nature as his core interest, he began a series of new works.
Known for his affluent, almost baroque style of painting, Xue Feng explores in this show “space” in its purely visual and abstract quality. In his new paintings he challenges the phenomenon of taste by transgressing borders of the appealingly ornamental.
For this exhibition the artist extends his artistic production into spacial dimensions. In 4 rooms displayed as a dense labyrinth of cabinets, Xue Feng thematises different stages of the contemporary artistic practice: the image archive, the artist’s studio, the manufactory area, and the exhibition space as a showcase. This structure is, like his paintings, executed in the typical Xue Feng fashion of the ecstatic and beyond when he enters the darker side of this realm, like how he also does in his latest “Submerged” series.
Showing the artificiality and exchangeability of our contemporary global culture, Xue Feng enters with his work the area of the cultural politics. He deconstructs Hangzhou’s flirtations with and highly cultivated approach on nature, which is based on a thorough appreciation and understanding of our culture of cartography, noting, “Maps contain a plethora of reports about reality, society, politics; this time using maps as a backdrop, I can use images as a concrete display of the myriad of facades of life.” The show “Enclosure” presents exactly this in all its facets and appearances.
