YANG ZHENZHONG

The exhibition comprises three parts. The first part is a looped, revolving installation at the centre of the exhibition space, at the centre of which is a mirrored pillar with wire fencing, surrounded by six couches made to official international conference standards. Viewers are free to sit down and take in the paintings and video works on the surrounding walls as the couches slowly rotate. The fenced mirror pillar reflects everything that happens around it.

The second part of the exhibition is a corresponding series of paintings hanging on three of the walls in the same space. The paintings are derived from official news downloaded from the internet, from which he extracted images of indoor scenes, many of them of meeting halls, conference rooms or other spaces made to official standards. Due to the absence of people, or his intentional removal of them, these scenes look more like still life paintings. Yang Zhenzhong has preserved the low resolution of the images from when they were downloaded, and in the process of magnifying them as paintings, highlighted their granulation and texture. Meanwhile, from the design of the frames and the background, these images appear to be in the process of being Photoshopped.

For the third part of the exhibition, Yang Zhenzhong installed four wireless cameras in two hidden corners of the exhibition space and behind two of the couches. Live feeds from the cameras automatically alternate between each other on an LED screen mounted on a separate wall in the space.

As for why choosing Still Life and Landscape as the exhibition title, it is because of the sense of the mundane and the ‘soft universality’ of still life and landscape painting, and even touches on the historical origins of the still life and the landscape. Still lifes are often up-close views, while landscapes are distant views. At first, however, they were both liberated from religion, gaining subjectivity from the repression of power. This logic corresponds with Yang Zhenzhong’s concepts and discourse. We can see that still life and landscape painting both underwent a progression from the divine light to the ‘light’ of nature and life. As Yang Zhenzhong sees it, the ideology that permeates everyday experience is itself a massive discursive space and confluence of energy, and for that reason, he hopes to use perceptual intersections and dialectic hybrids of vision (image) and politics to release more dimensions of power and momentum of life.