Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Tant Yunshu Zhong The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog from 28 August–1 November 2020. This marks the artist's third exhibition with the gallery after Tissue and Tissue Paper in 2016 and That's Quite Something during the Space Exchange Program at Canton Gallery in 2018. The exhibition presents the artist's most recent installation works created during her residency at the gallery. In the works she further expands her investigation of the interrelationship among the autonomy of material, language and space.
In 19th century, the famous English pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog was often typed on typewriters. This is the shortest sentence contains all of the letters of the English alphabet, and it is commonly used as a practice sentence for testing the function of typewriters and displaying the graphic aspects of the fonts. The artistic practice of Zhong is instinctive and it has the same internal logic with the sentence. During the three-week residency at the gallery, the artist spread the materials she prepared all over the space, including paratrooper rope, salt brick, antique flower pot, and different forms of nets. The materials with different physical characteristics come from humble beginnings: they are either hand-made by the artist or purchased online. The artist collected and put them in her own glossary to compose sentences of her own.
This process of choosing and juxtaposing the materials resulted in the 26 installation works in the exhibition space, and each of the works is named after a small thought about feelings in Zhong's notes. She makes the works to be of equal importance: as they are in the same route, creating a unique rhythm in the space and providing the audience an experience of slowly unfolding a handscroll painting. Zhong once described the relationship between material and language in her work: 'I attempt to make the object to be on an equal footing with the language that represents it. They all are materials, the object and the language.' When the materials are stripped off from its ostensible meaning, will new meaning be created?
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Artist Statement
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This exhibition is constructed by words, and the exhibition scene itself forms a whole, a sentence. The objects serve as clay for a sculpture or words for a sentence, and I type the required characters in the environment which serve as the keyboard, and present them in the space which serves as the screen. The materials of the artworks in this exhibition are rarely created from scratch. The process from 0 to 1 happens in other segments of social production. The found objects is discovered by a new vision, unrevealed from the department store, the internet, the pockets of a coat, or the soil of the past. The random materials collected in my studio are just like the 26 letters of the alphabet ready for phrasing. In my past works, materials were used in all possible ways. Routine is lettering, creation is words-forming, and finally, the exhibition becomes sentence-making. The game of art becomes the game of language, the game of words, or maybe the game of symbols, of condition and intuition in such contexts. Condition is elusive, but we can bravely admit it. Since born, we had naturally learned the language from motherhood, and we can also naturally learn naturalness from other natures. We can feel the texture on fabric, and see tiles on the roof. We use tools, to build or destroy. We ask, but not always answered.
I don't resist natural romance.
Press release courtesy Tabula Rasa Gallery.
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Beijing
China
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