Zha Ba’s solo exhibition is held at the Beijing Times Art Museum and it features his paintings from 2012 to 2015 as well as a series of sculptures started from 2009.

Zha Ba’s 2011 solo exhibition in Today Art Museum, Beijing, was titled Suspended. The artist tackled the image as still-life, injecting the “instants” into canvas, leaving them suspended. He tried to capture the intimate correlation between technically reproduced image and the pictorial tradition, proposing a painterly meditation on the photographic image. In recent years, Zha Ba has immersed in a new understanding of image. No longer obsessed in capturing the exact moment or instant, the artist now sees the image as a whole of figures interrelated. They become references, or occasions, where brushstrokes and colorfields blend, where the light touches the emotions in a contained way. Without distancing himself from the substance of pictorial orientation, Zha Ba pursues a feeling of “approximately” or “roughly” by accepting the impurities, or forgetting the absolute clarity of a stream. Under the impression of a mingling of mud and all sorts, emerges the running river to a faraway horizon.

We can hardly draw any popular contemporary art “concept” from the works of Zha Ba, we can hardly hit the nerve of the viewer with their subject matter, nor any reminiscence of familiar experience or feeling. Confronting his works, the viewer is invited to forget himself, then through an unfamiliar path, to reunite with a long concealed joy. It’s like the first eighty chapters of The red chamber dream, where no major events actually happened, only endless minute details in a mundane flowing of time and years that works its magic. Whereas in the last fourty chapters, dramatic events indeed happened one after another. The writing becomes eager to narrate, eager to accomplish some sort of mission, up to a point that the grand mansion collapsed while leaving no memorable traces.

The primary interest of Zha Ba’s work lays in the observation of the daily life. The contemplation of his work refreshes our perception, preparing us to see a different world. We may think about Morandi. More than just “bottles”, every outline, every color tone pulls the viewer closer to the painting itself. That is what Zha Ba struggles to achieve, the untranslatable essence of the painting, where dwells its very dignity.

Since 2009, Zha Ba started a series of sculptures. In an etymologic sense, sculpture - diao su in Chinese – can be unfolded into two different gestures : diao, to remove, and su, to add. Zha Ba perforates papers, which means to diao yet almost removing nothing, leaving no traces of sculpturing. What intrigues him, is the very part of “removal” that has barely been lost.

Being in a world saturated with visual stimulus, the oeuvre of Zha Ba formulates a calm, steady and distinct response.

About the exhibition

Dates: Jun 27, 2015 - Jul 5, 2015

Opening: Jun 28, 2015, 16:00, Sunday

Venue: Times Art Museum Beijing

Courtesy of the artist and Times Art Museum Beijing.