Opening time：3:00pm 7th May, 2016
Duration: 2016.05.07 -- 2016.05.18
Location: 1/F Exhibition Hall of Building No.3

Vice director of Committee on the theory in the Chinese Artists Association and chief editor of Fine Art/ Shang Hui

The image is the most important morpheme of contemporary art. Brilliant usage of images shows the artist’s creative art thinking. After the popularization of the image, we are surrounded by the images which are instant screen-shots of people’s normal life. Contemporary artists do not narrate factually and unimaginatively, but produce a sense of strangeness by replacing some elements of familiar scenes and behaviour. Therefore, audience can get new and strange experience. Actually, this experience is not just a kind of visual sensory stimulation but contains some ideological or historical metaphors. In a way, providing audience with meaningful and newfangled visual experience has marked artists’ most important creation and breakthrough.

In my view, Zhang Wei’s ink works belong more to contemporary art. Ink on paper is  a newfangled media to make images for him. His Series of City, Series of Homeland, Series of Floating Life and etc, depict scenes of normal life. On the basis of this, he makes use of the effects of ink imbibition to challenge normalized visual experience. Here, the creation of ink painting is not restricted by one methods. It owns a kind of aesthetic metaphor. The destruction of normalized visual experience obviously has become a way of Zhang Wei’s intervention of reality and creation of newfangled visual experience. The borrowing and diverting of fragmented images give his works metaphors. Audience can perceive metaphors in the cities, homeland, Autumn day, floating life and etc, which he depicts. The destruction, intervention, and subtenancy of images produce endless meanings. What audience perceive is more than what they see in his painting, which is his appeal.

As many other contemporary artists, Zhang Wei has selected many classical normal images as materials such as the image of Richter, and Morandi that are familiar with us in Series of Cities and Series of Salute to Marandi. Series of Eagle and Series of Kung Fu remind us respectively of the techniques of Chinese traditional painting and the image of Door God of folk woodcut. Therefore, these images produce an atmosphere of passing through the ancient and modern, China and foreign countries. It seems like to use illusions when writing Chinese Classical poetry. On the one hand, basic meanings of these illusions have been popularized; on the other hand, new meanings will come into being once used in a new context. The newfangled perception in his works in fact for the most part resembles the usage of classical illusions in Chinese classical poetry. Actually, oriental verve and mysterious metaphors are created by the intervention and sabotage of ink images. Implication, bold strokes, ink penetration characterize his painting. These classical ink languages have become an important rhetorical methods to integrate Chinese cultural/historical elements with contemporary art context. Therefore, intervention and sabotage of ink images are endowed with a cultural soul. Zhang Wei is always pursuing a sense of novelty - old, broken, magical, mystical. It is a reserved and illusory aesthetic attitude that he adhere to in the context of fashionable and flashy contemporary urban culture. It is also a kind of touchable cultural perception shaped during the process of continuous reconstruction and destruction of ink images.

Yang Weimin

Zhang Wei