Preface

Fu Xiaodong

It's such a honor to welcome Lichens–Zheng Jiang Solo Exhibition presented from Oct.22th to Nov.20th in the year of 2016 at Space Station. After Dust in the Sunlight, Lichens will be Zheng’s second solo exhibition held at Space Station. His two series of works Lichens and Motionless Shadow will be presented.

The inspiration of Lichens derives from Zheng’ s life experience and memory in Jiangnan, China. Lichen is a composite organism arises from algae and cyanobacteria. The hyphae of cyanobacteria wraps ceils of algae and forms the symbiotic relationship with it. Lichens firmly crawl across the earth, sprawling among the desolate rocks damp and dim, along the cliffs, trunks and meadow as the concealed power of the nature. It turns the rock into soil, sea into fields. Zheng places sand of different colors underneath the ordinary one and hides large amount of antlions inside the sand. During the exhibition, antlions will constantly go through the sand and turn the glorious but dangerous colors outside the surface. This scene coincides with the experience of Zheng living in boarding school. The sarcoptic mites hidden beneath the mattress crawled out under the darkness of nights to infest under the softest part of human skins like fingers, armpits, navels, genital organs and groin. “We used to observe the tunnels dug by the mites between our fingers in class and pick out them at the tunnel portal with needle. With the agitation of physical growth and the violent itch of my skin, I lived through my adolescence.” said Zheng Jiang. The desire hidden from the daylight of moral principles combines with the physical feelings makes one denies all, but confesses all, finding out no word to say. As a greedy and excessive desire, it lies on the opposite side of rationality. It flirts, disturbs and wanders in the space of ambiguity, magnifying the evitable itch into a hysterical pain.

Installation View of Lichens–Zheng Jiang Solo Exhibition

This is a potential projected by itself. The Potentiality of feeling becomes an abstract schema of intensity, connecting the possibility of reality to the vortex of virtuality. A constantly peeling, natural and vigorous tiny performance of sand acted by antlions will be presented on the small hill with colorful sand appearing on the earth. What welcome the visitors is a drama of pain, masochism and ecstasy, which will distinctly reveal or cure the assumptive and existing pain of humanas the subject.

Motionless Shadow, otherwise, reveals the autonomy of painting. The visible great form, begonia pattern on the transparent medium and work reproducing materials and color blocks claim another empire of painting space. The language of Zheng’s begonia window is formed by strokes and images. He applies creatively the physical changes of light as the smudge of colors, projecting the shadow on the wall and forming a new media for seeing. Shadow, in the fall of time and space, becomes another way of seeing. Such fall is a foresight of time as well as a review of memory, a spiritualism of pure form as well as the nature of things during the process of painting. Zheng connects his conceptual purity of abstract painting with the beatific image in visitors’innocent eyes. He uses an indirect connection between rationality resting in abstraction and content expression of collective consciousness to replace a represented single-relationship connection.With the effect of light, Zheng using a constantly reversing picture in certain space, figures that don’t form any image, invisible strokes and all the visibility are presented as perceptions and ideas, which place themselves in the mist of life taking itself as reference, calling for visitors to complete the work. The work itself serves as a media that gets light, shadow and visitors together, that touches perceptions and images, placed in the midst of invisibility, like the projection of the moment in theatre. The work, existing on other dimension, has been waiting for the descending of poetry and aesthetics between seeing and seen, between the expected and unexpected, between existence and non-existence, outside the two-dimensions, inside the illusion.

Installation View of Lichens–Zheng Jiang Solo Exhibition

About the exhibition

Dates: Oct 22, 2016 - Nov 20, 2016

Venue: Space Station

Courtesy of the artist and Space Station.