This exhibition took place at our previous Singapore location.
Pearl Lam Galleries is pleased to present Presence of Whiteness by Zhu Jinshi, its first dual-space solo exhibition since the opening of the new gallery in Dempsey Hill. Following his recent solo at Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong, which featured a series of black and white paintings, Zhu Jinshi will present over 20 coloured paintings created between 2012–16 at the Dempsey Hill space. The works can be seen as a dialectic of colour as concept; in keeping with his detached from colour series of paintings, here colour is transformed into enriched bodily forms traversing between whiteness and colour-filled three-dimensional space on canvas. Meanwhile, the Gillman Barracks gallery will feature works consisting of painting, installation, and text that span a fifty-year period, delineating a personal history of persistence and destruction as well as attachment and reflection.
Looking back at the end of the 1970s in Beijing, the revolving machine in the factory had more passion and ease and less political rigidity and confinement. On a coarse piece of cardboard slightly smaller than a sheet of A4 paper, Zhu produced his first series of figurative paintings, including Factory Series III on show at the Gillman Barracks gallery space. In Zhu’s 1985 Sunshine, produced as an abstract painting in the mid-1980s, he attempted to alienate himself from abstract art in Western Modernism with a touch of Chinese calligraphy aestheticised into abstraction. The visual arts (which Zhu mostly took in through publications), aesthetics, and philosophy that he was immersed in imperceptibly fuelled his painting style, which fell more firmly under 'abstraction'. Exhibited along with this painting is a wooden frame installation initially created in 1994, during a time when Zhu gave up practising painting for installation works. The fact that the size of the wooden frame installation is the same as that of his 1985 Sunshine painting is a profound coincidence that echoes the origin of the interrelation between Zhu’s painting and installation practice: collision and interchangeability. In the new millennium, Zhu picked up painting again, in order to object the objected, and the brushes with covered paint (2006–09) witnessed an unfolding path in Zhu’s reflection and experimentation regarding the presence of paint.
Also on show is a newly created text and paint installation—five canvases, sized 160 x 180 cm, each are covered with black paint and made five centimetres thick. Every table of paint is 250 kg, continuing Zhu’s tradition of using painting materials as installation, while the paint tables are accompanied by wall text (part of a conversation with Yu Haiyuan, editor of Kuart). The interweaving of installation and non-installation, painting and non-painting all leads back to the artist’s persistent construction of the subject, accompanied by his concern for the language of painting. The simplicity and thickness of painting becomes the crucial point of the performance in paint and space, as the presence of whiteness, such as the crevices, cracks, and blankness, resonates with the traditional idea of liu bai. Every accretion of one centimetre of paint signifies the indispensability of absence.
About Zhu Jinshi
Born in Beijing, China in 1954, Zhu Jinshi is a pioneer of Chinese abstract art and installation art. Zhu began painting abstract works in the late 1970s and moved to Berlin in 1986, splitting his time between Berlin and Beijing since 1994 before settling in Beijing in 2010.
Zhu’s solo exhibitions include Detached from Colour (2016), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong; Zhu Jinshi (2016), Yuan Art Museum, Beijing, China; Zhu Jinshi (2016), Blum & Poe, New York, New York, USA; Performance in Paint: Zhu Jinshi (2015–16), Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China; Zhu Jinshi: Boat, a Yi Pai installation (2015), organised by Pearl Lam Galleries and Hongkong Land at Exchange Square, Hong Kong, China; Zhu Jinshi: Simplicity (2014), Pearl Lam Galleries, Singapore; Zhu Jinshi: The Reality of Paint (2013), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong; Zhu Jinshi (2012), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, USA; Power and Territory (2008), Arario Gallery, Beijing, China; and Fang (1990), DAAD gallery, Berlin, Germany. Group shows include Black (2016), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, California, USA; Perfection by Chance—A Yi Pai Series Exhibition (2015), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, China; Thick Paint: Jean Fautrier, Franz West, Zhu Jinshi (2014), Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, New York, USA; 28 Chinese (2013–14), The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Orient/Ation, 4th International Istanbul Biennial in Turkey (1995), Istanbul, Turkey; and the 1st Xing Xing (Stars Group) Exhibition (1979), Gallery in Beihai Park, Beijing, China. His works have been collected internationally by notable public and private collections, including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, USA; Brooklyn Museum, USA; Busan Museum of Art, Korea; Delphine Arnault, France; Deutsche Bank, Germany; Mario Testino, UK; The Rubell Family Collection, USA; Guangdong Museum of Art, China; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and White Rabbit Collection, Australia.
Press release courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
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