Inna Art Space is delighted to announce the exhibition " Art on Paper", featuring works on paper by artistsChen Dongfan, Huang Peishan, Ji Xin and Liu Beining. The exhibition will open on June 3 and run until July 31, 2023.
This exhibition embodies a metaphor where works on paper serve as drafts of poems. As a concept, “poetry” represents the amalgamation of language, where phonetics, forms, lexemes, and semantics are restructured to hark back to the malleability and probability that encapsulates the initial stage of creation. On the other hand, "draft" signifies inception, a display of purpose, emanating a sense of directness where the pen seems to move in accordance with the heart. The creative process on paper resembles the drafting of a poem — it represents an "object awaiting completion". Despite the constraints imposed by the medium, art on paper can paradoxically encapsulate a comprehensive worldview through the swift dance of unbridled strokes.
Ji Xin's watercolor compositions on paper harness the power of pencil sketches and exquisite coloration to portray languid yet astute female personas. Some of these works serve as drafts for his sculptures and oil paintings, signifying the artist's journey from ideation to completion. During the creative process, the pencil’s imprint is captured by the paper at high fidelity, providing a glimpse into the artist's internal compass that guides his tranquil and purposeful existence. The unique light texture of paper, unlike the formality and solemnity of oil painting, lends an irreplaceable intimacy to hand-written drafts. The interplay between the creator, materials, and subjects becomes exceedingly intimate, preserving the artist's most cherished touch and the raw exhilaration of art at its most primal essence: where the pen lands, art is born.
Photography has an intrinsic connection with the paper. Since the inception of glass plate negatives, a myriad of paper-based impression methods such as albumen, platinum, gelatin silver, and carbon have woven an intricate narrative of the entanglement between technical media and artistic expression. Huang Peishan's works, guided by her contemplation on aesthetic language and media technology, reveal the propensity in her subconsciousness to capture objects epitomizing "artificial nature". In this series, Huang further utilizes AI to process her collection of photographs, thereby adding a layer of recursion to the embodiment of “artificiality”. As the medium for written records and information dissemination, the paper has an irreplaceable role in the human manipulation of nature. But as digital media supplants the storage role of paper, the destiny of paper mirrors the predicaments faced by humanity.
Chen Dongfan shatters the boundaries between painting and draft, allowing the paper to delve into its own fate, pondering the symbiotic relationship between the vitality of the artwork and itself as the medium. A book is an aggregation of papers, a tangled intertwining of quantity and volume, and the methodical nature of reading determines its temporal nature. Chen extracts the form of the book, extending the two-dimensional paper surface into three-dimensional objects within space. The qualities inherent to books — folding, overlapping, page-turning — augment the degree of freedom that his works possess. These "books" lack textual representation yet are inherently poetic; they embody the overwhelming strength and rhythmic emotions — The fiery blaze of vitality transforms into the serene river of poetic eloquence.
Liu Beining adopts a dialectical approach to illustrate the interrelation between paper and creation — between intention and art piece. Liu's creative process invariably starts with drawing and writing — those exercises on paper mark the genesis stage of his creation. Subsequently, an array of media such as vessels, photographs, and ready-made, begin to manifest. Then, elements like water, stones, dust, and fragments of the human body take turns on stage while the paper itself as a material is liberated — transforming from an image-bearing plane back to its intrinsic physical form. This practice of "liberation" reminds us of the essence of a "poetic draft", whether it is an endpoint, a process, or an indeterministic form capable of transitioning between the two states.
The "Art on Paper", by virtue of its state as a medium, epitomizes the most vibrant moment within the entire creative process. Each stroke becomes a "vector" with an unforeseeable trajectory. While we acknowledge that an artwork embodies its own life, the artist's existence paves the way for the creation and vanishes upon its completion. Nevertheless, in paper-based artworks, there is a heightened sense of preservation, which aligns closely with the very essence of art — It is merely a moment, yet it possesses the momentum to momentarily suspend time itself.
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