Asia Art Center presents the exhibition Ambiguity – Hang Chunhui 2017 in Beijing. Every stage of Hang Chunhui’s creative career carries an attitude to experiment and reinvent traditions, an approach that consistently changes and reconstructs itself. The exhibition showcases the artist’s latest artworks of 2017.

There is a verse in “Yuefu Poetry” that reads “as hibiscus roses are veiled by misty dews, glimpses of lotuses remain in ambiguity.” “Ambiguity”, the word expertly captures the illusions as induced by morning mists. The ancients have an extremely delicate way of experiencing visual stimuli, as imaginations of what beauty is often wander back and forth between “similarity and dissimilarity”; the equivocal approach is not only a poetic gesture but rather a way to see. Hang Chunhui’s Ambiguity is an exceptionally contemporary approach to creating and where a way of seeing lies; explicit definitions are not sought after, instead, visual complexities are perceived through dulled senses. The artist wanders between tradition and modernity while attempting to meld together the two, which is a visual game with tinges of Zen as realized in the spirit of pure aesthetics of Ni Zan as proposed in his verse “the free-flowing brushstrokes aim not to achieve similarity”.

Hang Chunhui never confines the artwork to be either abstract or representational but instead constructs an ambiguous territory of looking between the two-dimensionality of “painting” and the three-dimensionality of “sculpture”. Through the reflective qualities of paint as visible in the practice of colors, Hang Chunhui combines changes in light projections with linear rolling motions of sculpture to construct a “paradoxical” way of viewing. Visual logics along with the artist’s concepts introduce again the notion of “ambiguity”; this form of “ambiguity” is a return to the examination of “painting” and “sculpture” which finds its roots in the reveries of conceptual beauty. Hang Chunhui’s art can be viewed as a visual curiosity from the East but also a standpoint of contemporary creatives.

About the exhibition

Dates: 2017.06.24 Sat – 2017.08.06 Sun

Venue: Asia Art Center

Courtesy of the artist and Asia Art Center.