Shanghai Gallery of Art is pleased to present stillness is the move, a two-person exhibition seeking to reveal a shared artistic intentions, materiality, sense of place, and most of all, a personal interpretation of nature serenity and intimacies of process. This is notable in that it does not just function as an exhibition merely in honour of the environment but, in keeping with the extraordinary spirit that the realms of the natural possess towards artistic endeavours, attempts to shape the boundaries of artistic disciplines. A total of 12 paintings, made with either ink or oils, it is very clear that there is just one image in the mind of Li Xin when he puts himself in front of a blank canvas or Xuan paper. And that is the grandeur of the sweeping nuances of waterscapes. Based in Beijing and Paris, the artist’s oeuvre shows connections of experiences gleaned in different places, his childhood spent by the Yellow River, schooled in Beijing, the solitary years spent in France, the acquisition of various artistic techniques. They all constitute the genesis of his work. With the water being depicted in a velvety tone of greyish black or midnight blue, the paintings demonstrate a steady hand with deft technical skills. And the aesthetics suggest a contemplative moodiness as the artist adopts wavy lines and picture planes to create bold imageries, capturing a sense of voluminous space in water’s flow of movement. The end results can be captivating; indicating the sublime rhythms of the water sparkling under a pale shimmer of light. They reveal a whole universe where one colour goes through endless variations that float between the ultra thin and the dense. Though, it has never been too easy to capture the clarity of dynamics in something as delicate as water in paintings, it is more that his works bring together the artist’s interest in positions of consciousness, and the relationship between human and nature. A memory of water, a narration with life which is realized in flow and change.

New York-based Korean artist Yeong Gill Kim’s painterly compositions can be divided stylistically into two categories: spacious reveries that offer a more or less abstract version of the traditional Korean landscape, and works depicting simplified figures and distorted lines that drawn over a large field whose watered-down grey and black background feel like the ghostly remains of a remote landscape. These paintings convey a mood of lyrical exaltation, and contrast lively active marks, whether suggesting reeds or grasses, a mountain’s contour, or a figure, into a world of nature. In his semi-figurative abstracts, the canvas surfaces are scuffed and stained, setting up smudgy, accidental landscapes, with mountains defined here and there by clusters of curved lines. In a sense, the two styles complement each other. Both indirectly elaborate Kim’s experiences, first growing up in Korea, in the ancient city of Kyungju, and then during his extended stay in New York. The artist maintains a strong interest in Zen thought and his method of working, which is unusually swift, duplicates the spontaneity often seen in Zen art, in which the image or mark is regarded as a momentary record of internal mind states. Yet much thought goes into the making of the work: the quick execution follows long periods of reflection. As a result, the impression of the paintings of Yeong is one of lightness and monumentality. Certainly Kin’s is a powerful metaphor for the human condition, the contrast between the individual’s movement in a space that is silent and still.

About the exhibition

Duration: Dec 20, 2014 - Jan 31, 2015

Opening: Dec 20, 2014, 17:00, Saturday

Venue: Shanghai Gallery of Art (Shanghai, China)

Artists: Kim Yeong Gill, Li Xin

Courtesy of the artists and Shanghai Gallery of Art.