As one of the early pioneer figures of video art in 1990s China, Zhu Jia captures the daily activities through his subjective lens to reflect the corresponding landscape of social, cultural and ideological reality. The consistent concept of "the perpetual presence" between the past and future has been discussed and performed in his moving images. The motif is deepened and transformed into a distinct form of painting while he relocated to London in recent years. With the background of Soviet-style oil painting practice he gained in China, he incorporates the method of detailed image narrative to unfold the overlapping realm of real and fictional reality of his daily social scenes and hidden personal family history. His self-portrait emerges and fades in the latest two series of "Daily social encounters" and "Old Houses" but intentionally distances away from the centre of the depicted ongoing events. The former illustrates Zhu's social interactions in gardens or by the dinning table with his friends and family in London. In contrast, the latter reveals the dreamlike fragments of his mother's images, the layout of his childhood home and old fashioned antique furniture. He ultimately approaches to collage the images from his reality and thoughts that determines the certain and obscure intermediate state conveyed in the works.
born in China in the late 1980s, sees language and text as the foundation of her artistic practice to perceive the nature of the world through multiculturalism with an archaeologist's mind and the capacity in polyglot. Trained as a painter both in China and the US, Han initially approached the form of abstraction due to her encounter with abstract expressionism and re-contemplation of the tradition of Taoist philosophy. Further inspired by ancient Indian tantric painting, her interests grew into paintings, poetry, fables, calligraphy and books from Buddhism, Persian miniature art and ancient Japanese manuscripts. Driven by intuitive expression, she adopts interdisciplinary mediums from ink on paper, oil on canvas, and wood printing on textile to video and architectural installations to approach the optimal presentation. She ingeniously reinvents alternative perspectives of deciphering the associations from the convergence of cultural differences resonating with contemporary society.
Taking the eponymous title of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Games, her latest series of works presented in Art Basel this year is seen as the visualised poetry and literature of the collective experience of life, death, and spirituality in the space. Incorporating the Indian woodblock-printing method she learned in Jaipur, the latest triptych work, Purity and Danger is based on the mythology in Indian tradition and presented in the frame of an unfolding book. Imbued with symbolic elements in almost all her works, such as pearls, nightingales and flowers, imply the roles of words, narrative and structure to compose the imaginative landscape of both known and unknown. In Mandala of Insanity, the Sanskrit pattern presents the universe's process of disintegration and reintegration but also reveals how the artist artistically fathoms the structure of the cosmic universe. Taking inspiration from the 17th century Dutch Vanitas and Japanese Kusozu's paintings, she meditates on impermanence and impulsiveness of the process of being through the body of works Jewels of Impermanence. Han Mengyun unearths individuality from the intertwined ethnological, religious, historical and contemporary cultural spectacles. She contrives a new excursion into a cross-cultural experience in the lineage of art-making in history beyond borders.
Private Days (by invitation only)
Tuesday, June 14, 2022, 11am to 8pm
Wednesday, June 15, 2022, 11am to 8pm
Vernissage (by invitation only)
Wednesday, June 15, 2022, 5pm to 8pm
Public Days
Thursday, June 16, 2022, 11am to 7pm
Friday, June 17, 2022, 11am to 7pm
Saturday, June 18, 2022, 11am to 7pm
Sunday, June 19, 2022, 11am to 7pm
[Melati Suryodarmo][2]
[Het Bonnefanten][3] proudly presents [Melati Suryodarmo][4] (1969, Surakarta, Indonesia) as the eleventh winner of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA). On 12 June, the museum is opening the exhibition I am a Ghost in My Own House, Suryodarmo's first big solo exhibition in Europe and the Netherlands.
[Ocula Event Link][5]
Duration: June 12 - Oct. 30, 2022
Address: Avenue Ceramique 250 6221 KX Maastricht, The Netherlands
[2]: Melati Suryodarmo [3]: https://www.bonnefanten.nl/en/exhibitions/melati-suryodarmo-i-am-a-ghost-in-my-own-house [4]: https://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/artist.htm?artistId=589 [5]: https://ocula.com/art-galleries/shanghart/events/melati-suryodarmo-solo-exhibition-im-a-ghost-/