Hui Zhang
b. 1967, ChinaZhang Hui is a significant member of the post-89 generation of Chinese artists trained in stage and set design at the Central Drama Academy in Beijing. Whether it is the act of performance itself, or human interrelationships evidenced through painting and the construction of sculptural installation, Zhang Hui’s practice makes continual reference to theatricality, as a sense of physical awareness, but also as a mental space through which we further understand our relationship to ideas of lived and imagined realities. He was a key figure, alongside prominent artists such as Liu Wei, Zhu Yu and Qiu Zhijie, in the collaborative artistic activities of the ‘Post Sense: Sensibility’ Group of the late 1990s.
Zhang Hui searches for the space where reality and the subconscious, the normal and the abnormal interact. In his recent work, Zhang continues his performative exploration of duration and its relationship to ideas of time and space through an investigation of painting. Zhang’s subjects move from the rituals of banality which are anchored in everyday life, to the quest for dreaming – two primary components of this artist’s evocative dramas. His gestural surfaces scale the human on a spiritual and psychological level, employing elements of the theatrical (through color and scale) to create a dreamscape whereby his subject’s vulnerability is exposed to the viewer, often triggered by lines of text, seemingly borrowed from traditional fairytales and folkloric narratives, floating amid the landscape.
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