On the afternoon of September 1, 2015, Image Research Room (No.2): the Concept and Language during the Painting Process, which is planned by the well-known curator, art critic Wang Meng opened at the Rightview Art Museum in Beijing. Rightview Art Museum is located in Beijing Liulichang, and mainly focuses on traditional painting and calligraphy and it presents contemporary artworks for the first time. The exhibition invites a total of 25 representative artists, who were born in the 1970s and 1980s: Chen Xi, Han Yajuan, He Jie, He Xun, Hu Junjun, Jian Ce, Jiang Huajun, Li Bo, Li Changlong, Li Yiwen, Li Zi, Lu Liang, Peng Si, Qi Lei, Shen Hao, Shen Liang, They, Wu Didi, Xiao Fangkai, Xie Zhengli, Xu Hong, Yan Heng, Yang Fang, Yu Xingze, Zhao Lu.

The exhibition is the continuation of action “Media and Method in Today’s Painting” in 2013, through the spatial pattern of the “Research Room” the exhibition considers the work as “material specimens” of “visual study”, which are placed in a cell, to build an academic platform for the “research room”, emphatically forming an involved framework of “painting ecology” from the “five concepts” of image, idea, language, media and method, by which “concept and language” and artistic creation stimulate each other.

As for the exhibition, through the “research room” which concerns the “concept and language” of painting, the curator of the exhibition Wang Meng said that along with the development of contemporary art, the internal mechanism of art and the external force changes unconsciously, which forms an unique modernist order, creating an unique support system, which is very different from classical logic. Because the cultural paradigm changed, diversified and active artists appeared in China, the question is then how to understand the existential state of painting, which paid close attention by the creative circle and theoretical circle. The exhibition takes the concept and language as a framework, to explore the present paintings that cross the system which is built by the “5 concepts”, to enter process of the context of the “new generation” painting group.

On the day of the exhibition, the curator Wang Meng hosted an art symposium, where the artists started from “concept and language”, combining their own artistic creation with understanding to share their individual insights on materials, methods, concepts, original creations, etc.

Under the concept of curator, the exhibition hopes to become an “exhibition which is not an exhibition”, to organize the “individual” artists to form a multi-dimensional “painting ecology” by curating, to capture the fundamentals of painting itself, combing through the different styles of the artists, as well as the inner veins and process on the logics of the related painting vitality and possibility. Therefore, it is a curating process that is a taken with the “research room” as the methodology in a private art museum, it is an action-type exhibition of a “cultural process”. The art museum will also think about participating in the artistic process through the function of a “cultural process venue”.

The exhibition continues to September 20.

Text and photo by Zhang Wenzhi/CAFA ART INFO

Translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO