Art Basel Hong kong 2020
Online Viewing Rooms
VIP Preview (by invitation only)
2020.3.18-19
Public Days
2020.3.20-25
Artist: Zhou Zixi
Project: “The Wave”
MadeIn Gallery will participate in Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms presenting Zhou Zixi’s solo project “The Wave” gathering a selection of works from Zhou Zixi’s series “landscapes” and “portraits” representative from the artist’s 25 years career. This presentation will reveal Zhou’s specific painting language composed of images emblematic of a certain period and filled with references and strong emotions.
Born in 1970, Zhou Zixi currently lives and works in Shanghai. Since the beginning of his career in 1994, 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. The “landscapes” and “classmates” series constitute an important backbone of this giant building.
Zhou’s landscapes paintings, rich in allusions and metaphors, are based on ordinary and disregarded landscapes in China. The regular presence of water alludes to openness and diversified orientations: water symbolizes time, history, it is the wave and the movement, but also the flow of countless ordinary people, it is the undercurrent of thoughts and emotions. It reflects disaster and resistance, impact and annihilation, and points to endless dark tide as well as endless injustice. The plants, mountains and earth mounds filled with vitality, tenacity and forbearance refer to humility, manifesting a depth beyond the scenery.
“Classmates” consist of a series of portraits based on ordinary people’s fate within the process of history. They don’t only depict common individuals, they also represent the alienation and destruction of the individual within institutional and political life over an extended period of time. For the viewer, these portraits although showing unknown people present a certain familiarity.
These landscapes with strong feelings and allusions associated to the “classmates” portraits provide a physiognomy of a deep and complex era. They are the people who live in these landscapes, and their faces imply time, history and fate.
Without emphasizing colors, shapes and spaces, Zhou’s painting techniques mostly use drips, chaotic, fast and strong brushstrokes together with thin coatings and convey a strong desire for expression of ideas and emotions.
