ZHU JINSHI

During the exhibition period, audiences will have a rare opportunity to encounter the practice that has redefined painting as a question of material, structure, and physical experience rather than image or narrative.

Temple of Matter is Zhu Jinshi’s largest painting exhibition outside China and the first to present three major triptych works together, highlighting both continuity and variation in his approach to accumulation and structure. Shown in Singapore, a city shaped by the intersection of East Asian thought, Southeast Asian realities, and Western art histories, the exhibition underscores painting as a physical and spatial practice. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, it foregrounds material conditions and process, inviting viewers to encounter meaning through direct engagement with matter itself.

Zhu Jinshi emerged at a formative moment in China’s contemporary art history as part of China’s first avant-garde exhibition, the Stars group exhibition in 1979, which challenged existing aesthetic systems and institutional frameworks. Since then, his practice has spanned painting, installation, performance, and photography, while maintaining a sustained focus on the behaviour of materials.

In Zhu’s thick paintings, he often uses palettes, wall trowels, wooden shovels, and wide brushes to apply dense layers of paints on the canvas. This approach, which has become his iconic style, defines his art as a sustained investigation into paint as matter rather than image. The canvas serves as a structural support for accumulated, compressed material, giving the works a sculptural presence shaped by weight, pressure, and process.

The title Temple of Matter draws from the concept of 寺 (si) within Chinese Buddhism, particularly Chan thought. Here, a temple is not a place that affirms fixed meaning, but one that holds it in suspension, allowing direct experience to take precedence over interpretation. In this context, matter is neither symbolic nor functional. It is encountered through its physical presence and conditions.