Magician Space is very pleased to present its second exhibition with Tang Yongxiang and a new body of work by the Beijing-based artist. On view beginning of 5th September to 18th October, the exhibition brings together a selection of recent oil paintings produced over the past two years. Resulting from a deliberative process of experimentation, each individual painting is an autonomous composition, whilst together they form a wider arch of accumulative perspectives and conversations.
Resisting an over reliance of perspective or realistic likeness, forms appear in unanticipated areas on the canvas – a process involving a gradual dislocation of the image through incessant layering of paint. Objects and scenes are first captured unconsciously by camera, establishing a contingent relationship with the artist’s lived-experience. Without hierarchy, his paintings are suffused with fragments of scenes, gestures, body parts, objects and the shadowy absence of anonymous figures, which together become internalised within an intimate web of relationships channelled through the artist’s subjectivity through painting. With the artist seeking to paint towards an unfixed state beyond the directness of representation, his subjects circulate at a distance created from the untethering of the object from its context and entering them into a new logic.
Pictorial devices dissolve through brushstrokes that retain a careful measure of ambiguity, holding only traces of specificity so as to suggest a lingering emotional psyche. In many of the paintings, colour is uncoupled from academic convention, used instead as a method to coalesce and push amorphous forms into interstices and interrupt focal areas. This apparent simplicity of form belies a meticulous gestation period, whereby the artist negates and affirms both positive and negative elements of form, a method of decision-making guided largely by intuition and conditioned into a deeply subjective coherence.
Tang Yongxiang (b.1977, Hubei Province) graduated with a Master’s Degree in Hubei Institute of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Beijing. Exhibitions include major solo shows at Magician Space, Beijing (2015); Magician Space, Beijing (2014); Hemuse Gallery, Beijing (2012). Other selected group exhibitions include: Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong (2015); Klein Sun Gallery, New York (2014); Today Art Museum, Beijing (2011); Soka Art Center, Beijing (2008).
