Studio Gallery is honoured to present the duo exhibition More Than Still Life by Wang Cao and Zhang Yangbiao on 18 Feb 2023. The exhibition will focus on their recently created large-scale paintings.

Wang and Zhang are both Millennials, however, the theme in their paintings and their working methods are quite 'conventional.' They don't pursue certain art forms or fashionable styles superficially, nor follow trends, but take personal life experience as the force driving their creation. This is extremely rare and precious in the current art environment. It's also the reason why we chose to introduce their works to everyone in Studio Gallery's first exhibition this year.

Zhang's Ice Tray and Plastic Cup in red, orange, and green bring a huge sense of size; the objects fill the entire canvas like a monument. The colour saturation is high, but the visual effect is hazy and vague with a sense of alienation. Although you can still recognise that the plastic cups are placed on a circular tabletop, it creates an illusion for the audience that they don't know where they are located. Isn't this just like our daily life? We think we are in control of our own lives, but we often overlook even the most familiar things around us. What are we rushing for? Where are we heading to? The answers by the artist seem hidden among all the fascinating light and shadow.

These objects of ordinary life are only the intro of the artist when chasing after the truth of painting. In the context of China becoming the world's factory, Zhang gave up the traditional tools like a paintbrush when portraying still life which is relatively easier to follow with the hands. Instead, he works with the airbrush—a product born from the logic of industrialised production, just like those objects in his paintings. The greatest feature of an airbrush is that it cannot draw a clear outline, which is the physical evidence of the non-literary nature of the hazy feeling in the picture. The artist keeps and emphasises this visual effect showing the unity of the theme and the tool in his hand. To shape the object as much as possible with a tool that is extremely difficult to manage it, the tension of art is born here in the contradictory. The artist has to constantly move his body back and forth while painting to control the clarity of the outline. Therefore, what we finally see in the painting is not only the image itself but also the scent of life and the trace of the body moving in space.

The objects in Wang Cao's paintings are often larger beyond the paper so that you cannot see their entire outline. The incompleteness maybe comes from the working method—the assemblage of several sheets of rice paper to create a larger image. These partial tables, petals, and cloth texture build up a special perspective that is about time, not the object itself. Compare to what you see or what you recognise in the painting, it's more important that you SEE it in its current state. This is what adds to its simple, intriguing charm. We're not going to figure out if the painted flowers follow the laws of reality; a piece of tablecloth is already rich enough by offering its extremely simple shading. In Wang's works, it's as though someone has hit the pause button, freezing a moment in time for perpetuity. It exists on the fringes of a grand narrative—either gone before or about to begin.

Interestingly Wang's large scale lends itself more to varied ink brushstroke and texture over delicacy. The materials of Chinese painting are special since every single brushstroke is recorded. To paint with too many strokes or unconfidently often leads to failure in the end. Wang has to control the ink and melt away the colour difference of each stroke and maintain unity while keeping the image still recognisable. Just imagine: above a huge image, the artist is highly concentrated, painting over and over again, while controlling the unity of the picture. She has to act fast and decisively. We are not seeing a finished product but watching a show, a symphony of countless strokes in ink which retains all the actions and processes.

This is similar to how Zhang moves back and forward while painting with the airbrush. Working with huge-scale images, both artists stray away from highly-detailed still lifes, instead playing with materiality in their repeating working process in order to capture a spectacle of texture. Nowadays, it's not easy to see our lives like how Zhang and Wang do. Filled by so much information from the virtual world, we miss the time to look around and interact with real people and the environment. We seem to live elsewhere, losing our ability to see and feel wonderful moments in this physical reality.

Press release courtesy Studio Gallery.