Arario Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the upcoming West Bund Art & Design 2022. This year, we will showcase works by fourteen Asian artists from China, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia, covering works of various genres, including painting, sculpture, and sound installation, presenting the diversity and vitality of Asian contemporary art ecology. Arario Gallery warmly welcomes you to visit Booth A223.
The exhibition will feature recent works by seven Chinese artists. As the first generation of academic painting artists, JING Shijian's artistic approach is based on the deep study of oriental and Western philosophy. He combines multi-dimensional visual languages and never stops to explore the possibilities in art. CHEN Yujun was born in 1976 in Putian, Fujian Province. He has witnessed significant changes in Chinese society, and his reflections and explorations on the relationship between the individual and the natural and social environment are his creations' driving force.
Since the 1990s, as one of Shanghai's representative abstract painting artists, CHEN Qiang has been developing his own abstract art world. After a series of explorations of sensibility, rationality, and philosophy, Chen's recent works reveal poetic quality more than ever. Another representative artist of Abstraction in Shanghai, HUANG Yuanqing, has learned calligraphy since childhood. In the 1990s, the artist started the experiment of combining calligraphy experience with painting language, aiming to explore the expression in written lines in the way of 'writing' rather than 'painting.' In repeated writing, covering, and rewriting, the artist transcends his own experience and reduces the existence of 'self' to the minimum, freeing the expression out of the control of willpower as the most natural presentation.
As a representative of Chinese post-80s female abstract artists, LIANG Manqi is good at using tangible geometry to articulate invisible uncertainties, contradictions, and conflicts. She refers to the structured geometry and the richly coloured images as 'implicit space' and 'explicit space,' which correspond to the inner sensual thinking and the rational analysis of external things respectively. Her solo exhibition is coming up early next year at Arario Gallery Shanghai.
His travel experiences mostly inspire NI Zhiqi's creations. He likes to go to Italy, full of monuments, especially Sicily, because the marks of time are pronounced there, and he lingers on the fragments left in the present from different periods or their symbiotic relationship with something brand new in the present. He said that each colour in work corresponds to the actual scene and his subjective feelings. YAN Heng was born in 1982. Yan Heng often combines painting with installation to convey his messages to the audience. The gold or coloured oyster shells in the 'Poem Porn' series, once a favourite food of the wealthy in Europe, are now commonplace, serving as a symbol and metaphor for identity in this series.
In addition, works by established Korean artists will also be presented this time, such as the well-known newspaper series by one of Korea's first experimental artists, CHOI Byungso, who has continued the work of transforming the materiality of the substance through the repetitive and executive work of erasing the content of newspapers with ballpoint pen and pencil, as a unique methodology of his own. As a famous sculpture master in South Korea, UM Tai-Jung's works have an abstract and structural texture, solidifying the unchanging space to create a dialogue with the viewer. KIM Byoungho inserts circuitry into metallic sculptures, presenting a unique oeuvre of sound sculptures that create electronic sound. The energy of the work freely traverses between material and non-material, and visual and aural, allowing the viewer to experience a force that overpowers the space. NOH Sangho is an artist who interprets mass culture and social media profiles through his perspective. He uses his visual language to transport the viewer into a fictional world of non-linear plot illusions, allowing the viewer to glimpse the fleeting nature of culture and trends.
ARARIO GALLERY also introduces works by Japanese artists—Kohei NAWA and Nobuko Watanabe. In the 'Dune' series, Nawa pours the mixture of water and paints with different granularities, which spreads over tilted support. The result evokes the local elevations of the earth's surface and the circulation of its atmosphere—exploring the liquid properties of the paint while playfully deceiving human cognition. Nobuko WATANABE was born in 1948 in Tokyo and currently living and working in Osaka, Japan, and Düsseldorf, Germany. The artist uses a staple gun and fabric tenter to construct sculptural forms from fabric, with endless variations of colour and spontaneous shaping. Despite the simplicity of the work's structure, the collision of colours and composition of the canvas creates a muscular tension within the space, allowing the viewer to explore the possibilities of shape and materiality.
In addition, the booth includes works by Eko NUGROHO. The artist was born and raised in Yogyakarta, the heart of Indonesia's most densely populated island, Java. Imbued with macabre humour and satire, Nugroho's comic-inspired work may come across as seemingly straightforward—often a central figure standing against a simple background presented as a series of simple scenes from a larger narrative. While the artist's inimitable style of fusing and juxtaposing a wide range of visual elements (and languages), turns out as a particular layer of absurdity.