ZHOU YILUN

Three steps down the dim lane emit faint light from the doorthrough which visitors can squeeze themselves into anothernarrow trail under the corrugated panel. Four low-rises,casually arranged in the makeshift hall, all seem to have anunimpaired view of the stage on high overlooking the almostshanty town. It would be a wishful thinking. If the viewerventures into the two-room cabin, they will find no windowfacing the stage. Yet it is at least plausible to say the reverse:the eccentric sculptures arrayed on the stage have theall-seeing eye into the audience.

Though simply structured with sometimes readymade tripodsand plant stands, the sculptures are often lopsided andtilted, chiming in with the mishmash of colors and textures.Some in gaudy wigs and sunglasses, their faces, realisticallymolded or abstractly executed in a childlike manner,appear less as body parts than carnivalesque masks.However, they barely interact with each other, nor with theviewer. A Parthenon-like expressionlessness bizarrely emergesalong the way where the viewer meets all the vacuouseyes—if any—on the life-sized marionette-like figures. It is nota cynical or nihilistic statement mocking the ideal beautywhen Zhou refers to these seemingly crude structures asemulation of classical sculpture, but a delirious dream to join.Zhou imagines the sculptures in the Acropolis degrading andevolving, while the cultural-shaping mythologies arestrangers to his obsession with the form. In the same vein, thetitles of the works in this presentation are randomly takenfrom a book, the poetic words that spark imagery ratherthan endow personalities.

Floating on the front layer, dissolving in the middle or inlaid inthe back layer, familiar figures of religious icons, modern-daycelebrities, and, more recently, cartoon characters are set inan estranged relationship with the often mottled andsmudged backgrounds in Zhou’s painting oeuvre. For theartist, the figural ones perform almost identically as the__geometric forms and ornamental patterns superimposed onor displayed next to them, creating spatial oddity on thecanvas and board. In extreme cases, Zhou leaves holecutouts on the canvas in blank yet visually mesmerizing.When attention is driven away by means of careless figureaccumulations, it recalls the wry remark on the notion of thereferential in discussions of iconoclasm. For the artist, the eyeis keen with forms, figural or abstract: in the doorway, thehemisphere window, emblematic of the desire of seeing,resonates tacitly with the blue plate on the elusive canvas.Keen forms appear in his work in more random ways: dripsand splashes of paint, or even existing signs and marks onscavenged boards and tarps.

It is a game between forms and the eye. Nevertheless,significance can be traced through the idea of provenance.For instance, among the similar-looking wall lamps in thisexhibition, two are by Charlotte Perriand; the distorted Venustakes shape from a used and discarded silicone mold thatthe artist collected at a sculpture factory in ZhejiangProvince. The fact that they are from these two places seemsto be no surprise when it comes to the current discrepancybetween design and reproduction–features that are yetblurred in Zhou’s work when the works randomly punctuatehis playful rhythms of form. Images of marble, wood, and tileflooring unsubscribe the visual patterns from the material;religious and landscape paintings appear as mural wallpa-per, as both objects and witnesses of seeing, feeling,inhabitation.