Galerie Urs Meile Beijing is pleased to announce the latest solo exhibition of Zhang Xuerui (b. 1979, Shanxi) , titled In Search of Lost Time. Her artistic practice seeks to establish unique logic and methods of artmaking by intentionally setting up various constraints. Her exploration of objects, matter, and materiality under- scores an intention to trace transience and temporal modality. By adopting artistic media from painting to sculpture and installation, Zhang uses objects and painting methods to reflect on relationships between the self and others. She conceives her artworks as a conduit of artistic discourse and life spectacles where one discovers history, memories, present, and future.
For her new solo exhibition, Zhang Xuerui extracts the chest-like symbol, a central element drawn from a piece of oral history running in her family, to generate an imaginary space that would conjure the life histories of several generations from associations and fictive narratives. This symbolic figure also trig- gers latent memories expanding into broader social and historical contexts that have been filtered and re- fined over time. What Zhang Xuerui leaves on her canvas are time-graced histories, commemorations, and her quest for eternalizing the immaterial through a feminine approach of reconciling memory, experience, and imagination.
This exhibition showcases Zhang Xuerui’s latest series of Still-Life·Chest. Suspending in pictorial space, the open chest defies the rules of realist depiction, while its symbolic value stores multiple modalities of time and space. The artist, unburdened by the facts of a family story passed down through word of mouth and its blurry boundary between facts and fiction, inspires her to reshape a memory through her imagination. Hence, the chest becomes the entrance for the artist to outline the relationship between the characters in the story, imagine the social context in which the event occurred, and project ripples of sentiments and emotions. The selection of colors on the background of the painting extends from her previous approach of setting up a specific method for rendering its color scheme. Zhang assigns three primary colors for the three corners of the picture and divides the overall image into a square grid. Each square is filled with a blended color from these “three primary colors” of the painting. Traceable in nature, their varying ratios create a subtle gradation of color. The chest, set against various subtly rendered color gradations, crystalizes not only a personal story but also a collective one, taking the form of a common household item found in countless families to reinforce the social relationships it entailed through a re-enactment of the past. The backgrounds mediated by the artist’s acute perceptions superimpose multiple temporalities, engendering infinite possibilities for recalling, constructing, repairing, and reconstructing moments of personal emotions that have not yet been reconciled.
Fiona He
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798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road
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China
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