Curated by Fu Xiadong
Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong
January 16 – March 04, 2015
Galerie Perrotin is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Chinese artist Dawei DONG in Hong Kong, opening on January 16.
I have known Dong for a decade now. When I first knew him, he was still known as the precocious poet in school. We met again when he first returned from Paris upon finishing his studies in France; we talked about the surprise factors of street art, from him, I always hear new vocabularies. Dong had a serious attitude, his definitions for various concepts were meticulous; he also likes the nervousness and logic to words, and he grasps minor differences to almost a sensitive degree of poetry writing. Later, his works present the same qualities. A marker pen felt tip defusing through paper, a beginning of an unconscious mistake through negligence, has become a system of an entire creation. “Singular Point” is the point before the big bang of the universe, an existence without shape and form. All matter and energy emerges from this singular point extending into infinity. In all similarities to the singular point before the touch between pen and paper, ready with accumulation of time, space, the flow of kinetic energy, an open system is born.
How to derive a complete system via the limited character of the material from a singular ink point, it is indeed Dong’s specialty. By controlling time, temperature and humidity and thousands of attempts, a soft ink dot weaves an interactively restrictive, colliding, limitative web. They are not only orderly but both gentle and strong, displaying a layer of mathematics as well as pictograms with space for imaginations. By exercising their own limitation of the medium, Dong invents one set of rules after another; once a set of rule has been exhausted, he starts the next adventure on paper. Dong’s one dot limits the next, indivisible as a dynamic whole. The continuity of the movement is restricted by realistic order.
“Dust to Dust” relies on its uncontrollable gravity of color to complete the most mysterious aspect. The process of completing the painting is no longer just a presentation of a visual result, but through the descension of the pastel dust, a thorough and evenly remix of color occurs in the air, this process further decomposes and enhances the idea of painting. The body movement during painting is preserved by the layers of color compressed on its own. Dong yet again starts from one single element – the falling dust to achieve two results, the controlled and the uncontrollable; the certainties and the contingencies. Dong discusses the mutual effect of materialistic matter and intentional act during the creation of an artwork, the final results becomes a proof of the process. Prescription of nature and the innate materialistic is the natural aspect while the aspect of automatisms and self-regulation is the cultural. By provoking the different existing characteristic condition of the medium with the artist’s thinking process, the combination of the natural and cultural creates a balanced mid point between two extremities. Dong solidifies an idea of creation, not just a mere expression onto paper, by doing so, the artist creates an experiment, a method, a way of thinking.
Fu Xiaodong
