The works of Zeng Hong have been long since rooted in the particular politics and the process of industrialization in China. His life experiences in factories of the collectivist time helped him discover an unique way of expression. In his depiction of architectures and “publicized personal space”, he employs a working method similar to machine drawing: with an extreme restraint on image and pictorial language, presenting visually and psychologically the tensions between creation and repetition, vigor and imprisonment, monotonousness and richness, and in this way forming metaphors about today’s life realities.
In this exhibition, Gallery Yang shows the latest works of Zeng Hong in last three years. The specific architectural facades and emotional experiences in his earlier works has been taken away, and the elements of straight line, space, and body in them sorted out. Thus he achieves a screen-like effect, and the old appearance of his works gives way to a solid visual experience and an air of monumentality. He strives to obtain a sense of space in plane, so that simple images could have more complicate details and subtle feelings.
Also in the show is “Sequence”, a 3-channel video work. It is a group of clips Zeng Hong shot in some factory. The cameras were placed on the working machines. This resulted in the repetitive images, with the laborers absent in them being indicated. Here, labor means not a Chinese-style spiritual practice, but a mechanism of commercial exchange and physical discipline. In this incessant repetitive labor, what man obtains is not self-improvement, but a consciousness of resistance.
