“Separation” is Zhu Yu’s second solo show at Long March Space. It’s an exhibition looking back at ten years of Zhu Yu’s works on canvas, and is curated by Colin Siyuan Chinnery.
Zhu Yu is one of China’s least understood contemporary artists. Although this has never been his explicit intention, it is inevitable given his attitude towards art and the resulting methodology from this attitude. If anything Zhu Yu has been entirely consistent from his early controversial works involving human remains to his ethereal representations of tea stains. Although taking the form of a painting show, this is not a show about painting. This exhibition aims to explore Zhu Yu’s way of thinking and attitude towards his work.
For this to be possible, a corridor has been constructed in Long March Space, linking together its two main exhibition halls and forcing an entirely linear reading of the work. On one side of this corridor Zhu Yu’s paintings are crammed together in chronological order, from his first to his last with little regard for aesthetic sensibilities. In this treatment, individual works are denied their individuality.
Instead of ‘reading’ individual works, exhibition visitors are freed up to look at the artist’s way of thinking and working, which is something central to Zhu Yu’s ethos, and something perhaps denied to audiences before. Zhu Yu says, “In the end I want this exhibition to show a kind of project, something that compresses ten years of painstaking work into the idea of a single process. Maybe the paintings themselves are not central to this process, almost like the idea of performance.”
But the paintings of course are important, because it is the medium he has chosen to work exclusively for the past ten years. However, he has approached the medium in an entirely different way from other artists with the aim of creating a unique way of looking and representing the world. Separation refers to Zhu Yu’s insistence on taking a difficult path, separating himself from anything that might seduce him into making work that fits all too easily into today’s world.
About Zhu Yu
Zhu Yu (b. Chengdu, 1970) graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. Known for his conceptual projects that challenge the limits of artistic language, Zhu Yu’ s latest works are a series of highly realistic and detailed paintings of mundane objects. The first series titled, “Stain”, are teacups viewed from directly vertical over the mouth of the cup. The patterns left by the residual tea dregs on the bottom of the cup are filled with slight changes, almost as if to reveal another world within them. Following this series, Zhu Yu has also created a series of highly realistic paintings of single pebbles. The slight variations in coloring and the miniscule indentations are shown with meticulous detail. The pebble is a metaphorical object for our understanding of form and matter. Its miniscule physicality is similar to that of a Sarira, a life that has been shrunk down to its indestructible essence. At the same time, it is expansive, similar to an ovary from which all life bears forth. All matter is reduced to a pebble; all matter is emitted from a pebble. The universal condition of the world is that all things return to their remains. In these paintings, Zhu Yu’s sole focus on the details of these remains presents this condition at its most direct and forthright.
Zhu Yu’s work has been consistently shown at seminal group exhibitions including Post Sense and Sensibility: Alien and Delusion (Beijing, 1999), Fuck Off! (Shanghai, 2000), and The Third Guangzhou Triennial (Guangzhou, 2008).
About Long March Space
Founded by Lu Jie in the 798 Art District of Beijing in 2002, Long March Space plays a vital role in pursuing new avenues of production, discourse and promotion of contemporary art in China. Working to advance the careers of eighteen artists across three generations, the gallery looks to establish a portfolio of the most progressive artists working in contemporary China today.
The gallery tirelessly revolutionizes the ways in which art is perceived and presented, offering one of the most comprehensive resource platforms for the local arts community in China. Long March Space represents artists who are considered to be at the forefront of contemporary art, working in diverse mediums from painting, sculpture, installation, video, to performance.
As one of the first Chinese galleries participating in prominent international art fairs, Long March Space shows actively in both local and international art fairs, including Art Basel in Basel, Art Basel in Miami Beach, Art Basel in Hong Kong, as well as Frieze Art Fair in New York.
