Long March Space is proud to announce the upcoming winter group show “Peepshow” opening on December 12. The exhibition will bring together six young contemporary artists: Tianzhuo Chen, He Yida, Hu Qingtai, Lin Ke, Tang Dixin, and Trevor Yeung utilized disparate media and various methods to create vibrant new works for this exhibition. In order to better reflect each artist’s own unique art practice, ”Peepshow” is not bound by any overarching theme or title, with the exhibition space providing each artist with their own independent area in the expectation of enabling them to each give form to their varied work and intellectual processes, giving way to an open yet focused form of presentation, a peep into the artists’ thoughts and work at this moment in time.

About the artists

Tianzhuo Chen (Born 1985, lives and works in Beijing)

Tianzhuo Chen's works circle around the space between a supra-realism and a sort of transcendental or divine state. How to “transcend” to this state and the visualizations or materializations of the space occupied by the divine sit at the core of his practice. His work is informed by a sensitivity towards visual symbols often drawn from cultural domains outside of the context of high art, such as religion, popular and sub-culture. Original signs, symbols and motifs bearing specific meanings are created, and together they provide the framework of the artist’s practice. "Peepshow" will spotlight the artist’s works on paper, which could be considered as the most straightforward form of his variegated creative output and the closest representations of his thoughts and imaginative starting points, which will hopefully shine a light on the logic system behind this outlandish but fantastic world he has invented.

He Yida (Born 1980, lives and works in Shanghai)

He Yida concerns herself with the relationships between architecture, structural forms, space, materials, and the idea of “artwork”, with emphasis placed on objects that are fortuitously encountered in everyday life and their inherent texture and structure. Her work exudes an air of randomness or effortless-ness at first glance, however, it is imperative to recognize that that effortless-ness is a result of painstaking arrangement or juxtaposition of carefully chosen found materials and/or objects alongside hand-made sculptures, to create an assemblage that refers back to the random situations where these materials or objects first caught the artist’s eyes. In the works of He Yida shown in "Peepshow”, she utilizes comparatively insignificant and variously-sourced materials, and from the corporeality of sculpture she goes on to delve into the relationship between display and expression, concurrently delivering further deliberations on the nature of art itself, such as into its taste and value systems, and the importance of context and reading acting as a sort of projection.

Hu Qingtai (born 1985, lives and works in Beijing)

Compared to a creative process which begins from a point of absence, Hu Qingtai's practice is founded on a base of discovering, refining and renewing extant experiences interacting with people, consolidating these and carrying out a process of re-appropriated utility. The artist himself describes this as emotions being influenced by a certain pull, in turn carrying out a conscious function. His works focus on capturing and emphasizing those awkward or inescapably delicate obligations of intrapersonal relations, for example, in “Curvilinear Motion”, he copies his tactful refutations of friends' requests of favors onto clothing labels. Besides these sorts of trivialities of life, nameless chance encounters with strangers, and encounters and contact between friends, are also often transformed in the different languages of the various disciplines in contemporary art, and revealed themselves in the form of sculpture, installation, drawing, video, among others.

Lin Ke (Born 1984, lives and works in Beijing)

Lin Ke's studio is the Apple computer he always has at hand. He utilizes software commonly used in contemporary life such as Photoshop or Apple's Preview to complete series of works which fuse together ideas of 'control' and 'randomness'. His latest works shift the position of the creator (the artist himself) from backstage to the front, brining forth the concept of 'improvisation' and ‘performance'. Lin Ke's understanding of New Media is so broad that it could also incorporate the human body. His particular way of working lends itself to generating large quantity of material all of which, theoretically, could be works of art. Subsequently the selection process determining what is art and what isn’t becomes an integral and important part of Lin Ke’s practice, with the degree and standards of selection being both at times objective and subjective in the artist’s eyes. The works chosen here on the one hand aim to focus the improvisational and performative aspect of Lin Ke's work and on the other, look into the relationship between the virtual space often observed in his work and the physical space where his work is exhibited..

Tang Dixin (Born 1982, lives and works in Shanghai)

Tang Dixin adheres to two types of creative states: those of painting and performance. In mentioning the relation between the two, the artist expresses that at the beginning, the two disciplines were more interlaced and predominantly embodied in the supplementary possibilities of images, but ultimately they may lead off in their separate ways. ”Peepshow” will show works from both realms of his work, with an attempt to provide a connection between the two seemingly disparate working methods. The exhibition guides the viewer to enter the artist’s mind and imagination (his painting work) by way of the recording of Tang’s notorious performance where he put his physical self under grave threat. It could be argued that the elevating sensation evoked form such extreme bodily experience provides a portal into a well of imagination that is evidently reflected in the artist’s painting practice.

Trevor Yeung (Born 1988, lives and works in Hong Kong)

Trevor Yeung's creation is situated in the disciplines of photography and horticulture, resulting from his close interaction with plants and animals established when he was a child. He spent much time with plants and pet animals since he was younger, for he found interactions with the natural world to be more pure and sincere than those with human beings. In Yeung’s work, one often finds him/herself situated in a carefully-constructed environment, usually also accompanied by various life forms such as plants or pet animals. When the artist conceives these situations, he doesn’t only consider human visitors but also the life forms co-inhabiting the same environment. Yeung could be seen as a story-teller whose scripts are his purposefully-built eco-systems, and whose characters are the living organisms co-inhabiting the same space. Through these mini eco-environments, the artist reveals histories, memories or relationships represented by these plants or animals, perhaps also as a metaphor to signify how we as humans can face the insurmountable circumstances or the so-called destiny, consequently allowing for the possibility of finding one's position within the world that we live in.

About the exhibition

Date: 2015.12.12 Sat - 2016.01.31 Sun

Venue: Long March Space

Address: 4 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District, Beijing

Artists: Tianzhuo Chen, He Yida, Hu Qingtai, Lin Ke, Tang Dixin, Trevor Yeung

Courtesy of the artists and Long March Space.