2021.11.2-2021.11.28
Organizer(s)：MadeIn Gallery
Tsutaya Books
MadeIn Gallery artist Zhou Zixi’s solo exhibition “Promised Land” opens on November 2nd, 2021, at Tsutaya Books. The exhibition will be on view through November 28th.
Since the beginning of his career in 1993, Zhou’s brushstrokes progressively evolved to depict national and population’s trauma, collective memory and oblivion, individual alienation, events and crisis of our era. Developed from researches on history and literature, and the artist’s concern on human suffering, the paintings – profoundly narrative – use different angles to expand and create interactions between various aspects of time and space, society and individual, politics and culture, disaster and daily life among others. A relation is then built between the works, which mutually complement and reflect one another while generating an epic perspective. The artist regards his artistic career as an ideal construction, which permeates the sadness and absurdity of the entire history of human civilization. This exhibition presents recent works from three of the artist’s representative series, “Debris Flows”, “Black Hole” and “Lost Landscape”.
A black column suddenly inserts in the poetic and pastoral field. The huge volume, the inhuman sense of power, the hard and cold strong sound that all at once enters the melodic andante. Oppressive, docile, irreversible, and indestructible.
Looking down on the earth, between dense forests, terraces, or buildings, an unknown black hole swallows up all the light and collapses in an unimaginable density. The black hole is bottomless, and the crowd is not surprised.
The mound, the mound occupying the palaces, halls and theatres, and the past magnificence coexists with the muddy barrenness. Did this mound cause the destruction, or did the ruins condense into a mound? Ambiguous and obscure, the symbol of civilization only remains a vast and vague mound of mud.
This land always has a dusty undertone, which is more sparse than the sky and farther than time. It is about possession or bestowal, misfortune or miracle, fear or joy, turmoil or peace, about the “promised land” that was once promised to us.
