Galerie Urs Meile is pleased to announce our participation in this year's Art Basel Hong Kong in the format of the Satellite booth. We will deliver a trio presentation with emerging artists Ju Ting and Zhang Xuerui from China, as well as Tobias Kaspar from Switzerland at the booth. In the Online Viewing Room, we will focus on a selection of works by emerging and established contemporary artists including Marion Baruch, Hu Qingyan, Ju Ting, Tobias Kaspar, Qiu Shihua, Shao Fan, Rebekka Steiger, Julia Steiner, Not Vital and Zhang Xuerui.
Ju Ting (b. 1983 in Shandong, China) is one of China's foremost young female contemporary artists with a work characterised by coalescing two conventional art media: painting and sculpture, and obscuring the boundary between the two. Being made of paint and occupying a two-dimensional picture plane, Ju Ting's works seem to align themselves with the category of painting. However, they have a clear feel for the sculptural in both form and texture deconstructing the realms of painting. Among different series of her works, Pearl is one of the earliest series that she has been continuously working on since 2013. In the 'Pearl' series, a wooden board serves as foundation onto which Ju Ting applies many layers of acrylic paint on top of each other obtaining a certain thickness. She then uses a carving knife to cut open the paint vertically and horizontally. It then reveals the stacked layers of colour within. Here the knife plays the role of the paintbrush, forming three-dimensional brushstrokes. At the same time, the artwork's surface is embedded with many faintly visible layers. If the viewers move in front of the work, they will perceive the subtly shifting colours produced by the rows of vertical lines. Optical rhythm catalyses a once plain two-dimensional space, creating motion within the picture. As an interesting combination, Coral, the very new series from Ju Ting will also be presented at the booth. It is embedded with the artist's reflection on time, life, death and rebirth. In this series, the artist reshapes strips of paint that had been cut off from the Pearl series, and places them atop a concrete block, a simple object that is normally used in another context, and then pours several more layers of paint over these materials to fuse them into a single, growing whole. Through a powerful visual impact and explosive colours, these objects convey a unique vitality, making these long dormant objects radiate with new life, just like the beautiful corals that tenaciously cling to the limestone remains of their ancestors.
Zhang Xuerui (b. 1979 in Shanxi, China) graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2004. The formula of Zhang Xuerui's paintings is made of an orderly grid on the canvas, and gradually shifting colours filled into the units in that grid. She begins by selecting the 'three primary colours' of that painting, and places them in three corners of the canvas, which we could call A, B and C. If there are ten squares between A and B, then each square is a different ratio of mixture between the colors A and B, forming a gradual colour transition. Her painting process kicks off from a meticulous computation, but the colour that ends up in the fourth corner is entirely an 'accident', given that her perception of surroundings, emotions or hidden desires play active roles in her entire creative progression, until the fourth corner redeems an intimate harmony between her inner world and outer reality. In her most recent works, she has changed the excessively slow progression. A shift that appears in the picture as relatively strong contrasts in colour from one field to the next, or even within a cluster of colour fields, in something like a high note suddenly bursting out of a musical movement, creates a sense of motion in the picture. But her basic methodology has not changed. The visual precision brought by the contrast, and the overall elegance and harmony, still stand as the distinctive markers of her work.
Tobias Kaspar (b. 1984 in Basel, Switzerland) built his connection with China through his solo exhibition Horn of Plenty at Galerie Urs Meile Beijing in 2019, where he among other works created a group of photographs with content of plain textiles with embroideries that have a historical Asian background. Since 2015 Kaspar has been producing artworks using the infrastructure of a Swiss textile company known for producing fabrics for haute couture, and in the process became interested in a series of embroideries the company developed for the Asia market from the 1960s to the 90s. He then photographed their once highly sought-after samples, and 're-exporting' them to Asian countries in the name of art. In the presentation of our Satellite booth, three large-format photographs whose appearance often plays with the viewer's perception of the real textiles, occupy the central position. Content wise one sees the polo players in a match - one of the markers of the aspirations of Asia consumers towards Western lifestyles, which Kaspar is now questioning. The pattern of the three works is the same but with various colour combinations. With the use of photography, a method for capturing images with a sense of distance, Kaspar has produced pictures with bright colours and clean, simple forms.