Between Art Lab (Shanghai) presents pictoriality-centered “In-Between Painting”, a platform for the artists to communicate to the audience their understanding of pictoriality. Titled “In-Between”, the exhibition, comprising two parts, to be held respectively in Shanghai and Beijing, provides a discussion on the pictorial outcome of experimental paintings so as to seek the pictorial balance in a state of uncertainty.

According to Baidu.com, among the series of drawings an action requires, the first and the last are called key-animetors, and the rest are called in-between, on which whether an action is smooth totally depends. In recent years, more and more artists bring fuzziness into the part that is in-between, thus leading to in-between painting as a concept. While shifting from the image to the paintings in-between, these artists turn their attention to the repellency of the market image and the perceptual experience. The phenomenon is a help to our discussion about their conflict. Due to the transformation in social context, painting suppresses and brings changes to language.

The exhibition, with this title, is aimed to highlight the final painting as the result of the experiments in painting. It is not based on the result, and neither does it take the iconic meaning and social context as the starting point. Rather it is directed to a pictorial language that grows in the process of painting and builds the result with experiments as a medium. In-between, as a matter of fact, means more the process that stays between the beginning and the end, and more importantly, it is oriented to the result of painting as a process and its procedure or route. It means returning to the artist as the key to the discussion of texture, traces and making use of the fragmented iconic semantic content as the foundation of an individual artist’s work. By means of painting, they cover some important issues, like techniques, expression, discourse, and explanation of the theme, during which personal painting and the style are taken into consideration. On one hand, it is analytical thinking about the technique-experimental route-formation of language-result shown on the painting. On the other hand, we wish to highlight the more open and lively works and mentality of these young artists.

This exhibition is also expected to be a discussion of a state in which it is neither this nor that, and at the same time, it is both this and that. What we talk about pictoriality is derived from western painting, but viewed in the perspective of the current Chinese pictorial language in the global context, we did not take everything as it is from the west, and neither did we maintain the Chinese tradition in a faithful way. What is in between, however, is a fusion of the eastern linear structure and western shape, colors, blocks and plane, from which generates creative instinct that is the basis of the nature of painting here. I may take the ontological aspect of painting as a starting point and avail myself of the specific cultural elements particular to Chinese artists, so as to find my own understanding of painting and building my own pictorial icon. Concepts, forms, and iconic reflection can serve as reverse thinking, and the rich pictorial language of these artists can be a proper starting point of our reflection on how to find new dimensions for painting as art.

About the exhibition

Date: 2015. 12. 27 – 2016. 02. 01

Venue: Between Art Lab

Courtesy of the artists and Between Art Lab, for further information please visit www.betweenartlab.com.