Studio Gallery is pleased to present artist Zhou Zhou's first solo exhibition Chinese Speed. The exhibition will open on 4 November 2023 at our gallery space, showing a series of embroidery paintings created in the last two years. At the same time, the documentary perspective of an interview video is introduced to sort out the artist's artistic practice process in recent years.

Chinese Speed

Text by Young Ran, Curator

'I don't work for interpreting any concepts. My works originate from my concrete life: first, materials, and second, problems. Specific materials stimulate my passion, and specific problems lead me to new ways.'

— Zhou Zhou

There is a kind of artist whose spirit surfs in the trend of thought, but his body lands in a quiet place and engages in slow self-manufacturing. While the social climate is fluctuating and the situation is advancing without retreat, Zhou Zhou has steadily produced a series of embroidery works with a distinctive worldly appearance in the past few years of hibernation. Since the advent of industrial manufacturing, the debate between technology and labor has continued to clamour, and new visions have emerged one after another. However, Zhou's work alternates between East and West and traditions, capturing the fierce battle between history and daily life with the evenness of a needle and a thread, telling another reverie about human nature. This exhibition will focus on presenting Zhou Zhou's series of works from 2022 to 2023. In this particular period, her works seem to be a variation of today's rapid manufacturing and a humorous weaving of the souls of countless characters.

Around 2020, when Zhou Zhou and I met at an exhibition, the most talked about was her detailed description of field planting and the daily life of vegetables and fruits. Interestingly, the wording of labour was seemingly out of place in the pan-media photoelectric exhibition space, yet these 'relaxed things' seemed urgent in her life. Zhou Zhou has a clear perspective on life's direction, whether it is her early landscape works or later horizontal practices using her body as a medium. We can see that she has lasting insight and endurance in the generation of either concepts or language. She repeatedly questions the subject matter of her works, the origins of their content, and where they are going, pointing directly to the central scene of society, and has formed a reconstruction of the real picture of the intertwined contradiction between the visible events and the invisible facts. It is worth noting that her externalisation of the social landscape reveals a special 'viewing technique' which, as she puts it, begins with the reflection on public life and is orchestrated in the speech of pictorial language. Her works are progressive, not overnight successes, and never come to a sudden end...

All of this seems to be a different rhythm of contest with the current weakness of internalisation. Classical Chinese paintings have always been very classical in their presentation of 'proximity' and 'remoteness'. Drawing on the essence of contemporary vision, Zhou Zhou takes advantage of the material's dispatch, choosing the reverse game between embroidery and painting and taking The Scholar Stone as an example, spreading the threshold of symbols to diffuse and permeate the normality, so that there is a constant change in the complexity and variety of in the world created by the artist. The characters in the image not only shuttle through the cave but also quietly internalise themselves in positive and negative forms. Rather than depending on the shape of the object itself, it is her choice of a vision interwoven in order to make a comprehensive view, guide the situation according to the circumstances, and give the scene a brake.

She makes bold collages, leaving sloppy threads and decadent pins on the canvas, forming a sharp contrast with the fine embroidery process, creating a visual logic overlap and destruction, like an unfinished disorder scene; and with a leisurely momentum, she uses playful wit to resolve the logical overlap of the social scene. If you look closely, light from the mobile phone was pictured in just one stitch. The improvised expression arcs, the seemingly serious scene of a car accident, and the petal clouds that do not know the way back, as well as the chaotic silhouettes of the human figure, are interlaced in the glossy and silky flat-needle embroidery. Each of them has its role to play in the picture, performing a scroll-like theatre style of viewing that encompasses everything. The confrontation between the group and the incidental individuals in this series of works creates a subtle distance. A distance that is difficult for people to approach without excessive close-ups. In the dynamic momentum, each person in the painting has their own position, while the whole is seen as a distant image.

In a sense, Zhou Zhou's practice begins with criticism and seeks to bridge the gap, chronically generating amid many heterogeneities. She uses the viewing and reconstruction of objects to provide feedback on reality's hidden and subtle aspects. The self-created artists must have novel creative evolution, which is precisely the constant contemplation and vision of today's contemporary Chinese artists.

Press release courtesy Studio Gallery.