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Press Release

OUYANG CHUN
Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong / July 18 – August 17, 2013

A prolific imagination and incredible diligence are the strongest impression Ouyang Chun leaves after a first meeting. Not too long ago, he painted every morning tirelessly from 2pm to 6am, aside from sleeping, he only painted.

Ouyang Chun is a man of contradictions, while he uses his innocent and perceptual paintings to suck in his viewers, he himself has had a rather complicated life of experiences, and has exceptionally rational thoughts on art itself. He abandoned middle school, ran away from home and self-educated in the ways of the world. He brushed up against seedy underworld types, who were to later be reincarnated in his paintings as “evil”characters.

Ouyang Chun’s paints an illusory world of childlike imagination that lets him safely dodge the complexities and excitements of reality. At first glance, his paintings look like the scribbles of a child, they are piled up with intense colors, generous
layers of oil paints, unrestrained brush strokes, with Ouyang Chun’s metaphors. Ouyang Chun’s painting unintentionally reveals a kind of natural purity, it seems to resist age as well as certain established traditions of painting, but it doesn’ t feel affected; perhaps we can conclude it has a poetic and magical enchantment.

Luminescence is a series of works Ouyang Chun had been working on from 1998 to 2006, by collecting day to day objects and painting on them, including small boxes, posters, plastic bags etc. His creation, on one hand is very personal narration of life experience, on the other hand, is a sensitive approach to communicate with audience. His way to display thousands of small paintings in a whole wall reaching the ceiling endows these earthly stuff some kind of religious significance.

Ouyang Chun’s academic deficiencies are good and bad, he lacks the painting habits learned over practice, but is instead in touch with a primal force of life, a spiritual influence, and is sympathetic to color. Such poetic images tantalize the collective unconscious of the Post 70s generation.

Huang Yuxing
galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong / July 18 – august 17, 2013

With this exhibition works of the new series “River”, Huang Yuxing totally abandoned conceptual art, and absorbed himself in the exploration of painting language itself. The paintings look classic, simple and even a bit tedious. It is always one river, either silent or running with whirlpool, and a few trees overlapping with architectural structures as background. But all these seemly simple surfaces are coming out of layers upon layers thin and transparent colours interweaving and interplaying, as well as scraping with knives. Standing in front of these mottled dark blue and green tone paintings, it feels like Monet’s water lily pool, or Rothko’s overwhelming abstract colours. Chinese philosophy believes still water going deep. There is always unpredictable passion underneath external calmness. About this new series, Huang Yuxing’s only explanation is: I just want to paint the lapse and standing still of time. Things flow away day and night, but when an artist standing in front of his canvas, the world is timeless and immortal.

The development of paintings is sluggish nowadays. Compared with other artists in the same generation, Huang Yuxing’s style reveals singularity, which seemingly detached from current social contexts. Yet, there are practically apparent relations
with his educational background in the academy, exposing a “fallacious” aesthetic value and “paradoxical” comprehension, which are especially apparent in his latest undertaking. Strong visible impact intertwined with practically thin paints attached to the canvases, endowing the whole picture with an eerie aura. Despite the surrealism prevailing in his paintings, sarcasm about politics, even not explicit or pertinent, serves as the quintessence. Huang’s detachment mirrors a collective consciousness of bunch of people in the same generation. Renouncing conceptualism when starting painting, Huang typically fulfills his artistic practices along with modernism, imbuing the new surroundings with new significances and values.

Gao Weigang
Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong / July 18 – August 17, 2013

Gao Weigang (b. 1976, based in Jixi, Heilongjiang Province, China) is an intensely versatile artist, reveling in his capacity to turn from painting to performance and then to sculpture in the short space of a single project, emphasizing wild experimentation and bold initiative over style or unitary practice. The 2011 winner of the ArtHK Art Futures prize, Gao Weigang evades categorization of his artworks into a particular genre.

His language makes each piece both the apparatus and the product of experiment, transforming objects so they break through the audience’s natural and ideological perceptions of the material world. Gao Weigang’s creations are also personal: they are milestones in the artist’s quest of self-reflection and a constant re-examination of himself. Despite the many artistic forms and materials Gao Weigang adopts and the great aesthetic variations throughout his works, they all reflect his intention to challenge the viewer’s accustomed visual culture with a sense of humour and an overriding hint of skepticism. Whether it is painting, sculptures or installations, the artist manages to retain a strong sense of medium-specificity.