The Cutting Edge of Lu Shengzhong @ Chambers Fine Art, New York

The Cutting Edge of Lu Shengzhong

Chambers Fine Art, New York

December 4, 2023 – April 14, 2024

Chambers Fine Art prsents The Cutting Edge of Lu Shengzhong. In the history of Chambers Fine Art, Lu Shengzhong (1952-2022) played a role of particular importance, both chronologically and as an indication of the guiding principles of the gallery after It was established in New York in 2000. This display of selected works is a tribute to Lu’s singular vision as an artist and as an influence on several generations of younger artists at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing where he taught for many years. 

When Christophe Mao made the decision to open a gallery devoted to contemporary Chinese art in the years immedIately before the millennium, there was an urgent need to identify a group of artists who did not conform to what had already become a stereotype in the West, the flashy oil paintings associated with Political Pop and Gaudy Art. When he was introduced to Lu in Beijing, he immediately felt that he would be an ideal candidate for his first exhibition of contemporary art as at that time the plan was to have alternate exhibitions of contemporary art and Classical Chinese art and scholar’s objects.  

Born in Shandong Province China in 1952, Lu Shengzhong graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1987, where he had been associated with the Department of Folk Arts.  Continuing his research, he made numerous trips in Shanxi Province and other areas where he developed considerable expertise in the tradition of paper-cuts pasted on walls, windows etc., particularly for Chinese New Year.  He was the author of numerous books on the subject.  

Simultaneously, he was establishing a reputation with his own remarkable paper cuts in which he said, he “walked away from the cultural confusion of the time and turned back to the villages, to traditional Chinese folk art.” He began working on a very large scale, as in the 1990 installation Hall of Calling the Soul  filled with thousands of the “little red figures ” that were to become his signature as a paper cut artist.  

The title of Lu Shengzhong’s first exhibition at Chambers Fine Arts, First Encounter (November 11, 2001 – January 2, 2002) refers not only to the first meeting between Christophe Mao and Lu Shengzhong but also to the introduction of Lu’s art to the United States. In the large vertical panels of Poetry of Harmony, lines of what appear to be Chinese characters are in fact left-over scraps of paper from the intricately cut circular forms at the top. The relationship between positive and negative forms is of crucial importance in Lu’s art. Favorably reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times (January 5, 2001), he noted that Lu “used this fragile medium , notable for its lacey, intricate patterns, to create a temple-like installation.” 

Two more exhibitions followed at Chambers Fine Art, Lu Shengzhong’s The Book of Humanity (November  6, 2003 – January 4, 2004) and Square Earth, Round Heaven Lu Shenzhong Works 2007. In the former, there were two series of works, sets of books in which red on black or black on red collages were gathered in book form, some with Western style bindings, some with traditional Chinese sewn bindings, and Human Bricks in which the hundreds of sheets of red paper from which“little red figures “ had been cut were assembled in multi-layered collages. In the latter, Lu moved into three dimensions, assembling multiple layers of paper into cubes and spheres, described by Robert E. Harriet, Jr., as the “visual and spatial correlates of round/heaven  and square/earth that permeates Chinese art and architecture.  

In his role as an educator, Lu Shengzhong became the director of the department of experimental art at CAFA in 2004 and retained that position until his retirement.  Lu Shengzhong’s achievement as an artist was to develop the traditional Chinese craft of papercut in such a way that it was possible to use it not only for small scale individual works but also for installations of great complexity. For those who had the privilege to watch Lu Shengzhong at work, using his scissors with unerring skill so that complex designs in which positive and negative forms emerged effortlessly without any preliminary drawings, it was no suppose that the same gift could be used in the creation of three-dimensional versions of his “little red men.”  

CHAMBER FINE ART

55 East 11th Street, New York, NY 10003

www.chambersfineart.com

Shuyi Cao, Antonia Kuo, Furen Dai, Tiger Cai, Emily Cheng @ Chambers Fine Art, NYC - Matter Matters

Matter Matters

Shuyi Cao, Antonia Kuo, Furen Dai, Tiger Cai, Emily Cheng

Chambers Fine Art, New York

Through August 26, 2022

In much of today’s world, the accelerating narrative of technology and progress has resulted in an overly narcissistic point of view, where humanity has developed the misguided belief of having control over all things. We ignore the idea of our own insignificance in the greater cosmos and lose the sense of wonder and awe of where we are and what is unknown. This line of thought has led people to settle for a controlled 'one-click away' world, with a desire to continuously optimize and refine technology. 

The historic changes and upheavals in society due to the recent global pandemic have caused a sense of disorientation, uncertainty, and dislocation of physical and psychological time. The upheaval has exacerbated ongoing imbalances in the global political and economic systems, and has forced many of us to think outside of the established, “technological progress” paradigm once again. The artists in this exhibition seek to pull the lens farther away and humbly look at and explore the hidden, impenetrable, and unexplainable things. From their own carried perspectives, their work reflects upon human existence from a broader dimension of space and time, in an attempt to see where we are and how far we are from everything. 

Shuyi Cao’s work looks at geological history, examining the traces of biological existence that have been compressed and condensed into the earth’s crust. Her hand-blown clear and colored borosilicate glass pieces (Many-heads, etc.) resemble an aerial view of some unknown topography. With distinctive forms that evoke preconscious memories of primordial microscopic organisms, these fantastical creatures exude a mixed sense of familiarity and estrangement, perhaps recognized from past incarnations of our very biological and geological origin; while simultaneously encoding the clues of future evolution. Precarious Encounter (2021) imagines the interspecies relationship between fungi and its host body, exploring another form of entangled life through contagion and co-becoming.  

Antonia Kuo looks at the spontaneous interaction of matter itself, using a photographic process to create chemigrams that blur the boundary between photography and painting. Matter collides with matter in unpredictable ways, much like human encounters. Conventional prints are processed relatively quickly in the darkroom. Chemigrams, by contrast, can be worked on for days or weeks, time enough for Kuo to selectively apply coats of developer, toners, dyes, and fixer to her paper. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the chemigram process is that the practitioner can rearrange and alter the chemical steps in the service of whatever effect she desires. In Carpet Beetle and Sieve (in mauve), Kuo integrates several processes of image production from different periods (analog, digital, exposure) into one. As she creates the works, seemingly unquantifiable traces of movement of matter, such as light and time, are transformed, recorded, and developed into images. Bouncing between the controllable and the uncontrollable, the manufactured and the mutated, Antonia's works ultimately present images that reveal the delicate balance between man and matter. 

Furen Dai critiques the institutional art system, examining the essence and positioning of cultural institutions whose role in documenting human culture is crystallized in Western aesthetics and bias. Dai wryly challenges museums and their colonial origins through her fresco works that depict barren museum pedestals. Based on a video piece in which she depicts a dystopian future where humanity has been lost due to a global pandemic, the empty pedestals are revealing in their design - created to elevate the objects they hold, but also stylized in a manner that subtly reinforces the highly categorized and Westernized point of view. At the same time, Dai’s works reference the often-invisible labor of craftspeople who shape museum spaces, and build the platforms and containers that elevate and protect the collection.  

Like Dai’s narrative, Tiger Cai also frames his works in an imaginary post-apocalyptic era, but presents his story of the destiny of the human species from a cosmic vantage point, literally set in outer space. The death of his pet goldfish served as the introductory lesson to life and death in his childhood, and thus became an ongoing metaphor for the afterlife in his paintings. As the fish sails into the unknown, Cai zooms out beyond the confines of the Earth, contemplating human existence as a small part of the larger universe. His comets and asteroids that appear to be alive, in stark contrast to the geological forms that inspire Shuyi Cao’s work.  

Similarly ‘cosmic’ in nature, Emily Cheng's paintings are charged with conversations about spirituality and the unknown energy of the universe. Her paintings invite introspection more than commentary. She no longer gazes at what is happening in the Anthropocene but instead moves beyond the established framework of "society" and "civilization" to the realm of metaphysical reflection. The geometric patterns and vivid brushstrokes that make up her paintings are suggestive of elemental forces and subject matter: magnetic fields, the body, and religious iconography. Symmetrical, diagrammatic shapes interact with velvety colors and flexible, curved line-work, tapping into what Cheng describes as the "potential of unseen things or unknown force".  

All five artists are based in New York, and although their works are highly individual, the manner in which they deal with their chosen subject matter share a similar sentiment. Even before the pandemic brought much of the world to a sudden halt, these artists chose to work from a perspective outside of the common narrative. Now, as the world struggles to return to normalcy, their work serves as a reminder that humanity is only one small part of a greater universe.

CHAMBERS FINE ART

55 East 11th Street, New York, NY 10003

www.chambersfineart.com

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Wu Jian’an: 500 Brushstrokes @ Chambers Fine Art, ArtFarm, New York

Wu Jian’an: 500 Brushstrokes

Chambers Fine Art, New York

Through August 31, 2022

“These 500 Brushstrokes were completed in 2021. They spent over a year in transit at sea before landing in New York. Today, when I see them again in 2022, I have a sense of familiarity and strangeness. There is some sweetness hidden underneath, and feelings of hope and optimism. I feel that the time I created them was not long ago at a time when a force of gathering and wishing to generate something consequential was moving between the strokes, eager and calling out.”  – Wu Jian’an, Beijing, May 2022

This summer the main gallery of ArtFarm is devoted to ten recent examples of Wu Jian’an’s ongoing series 500 Brushstrokes on which work commenced in 2016. The abstract formal language characteristic of these works came as a considerable surprise to Wu’s admirers as until then there had been a strong element of figuration in all his major series of paper cuts from 2003 onwards with the series known as Daydreams.

Born in Beijing in 1980, Wu Jian’an graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) Beijing in 2005 and currently lives and works there. While studying at the Academy under Lu Shengzhong whose early studies of Chinese folk-art led to a life-long involvement with the traditional craft of paper cut, Wu conceived of ways in which this technique might be used in ways that would have been unimaginable to its original practitioners.  A small group of earlier works by Wu hanging in the corridor leading from the gallery shows how his technique evolved from the silhouetting of complicated paper cut-outs against monochromatic sheets of paper to the use of multiple layers of paper of different colors resulting in low-relief effects.

There does not seem to have been a transition period between the wild paper cuts for which he was best known at the time and the equally wild but abstract compositions characteristic of 500 Brushstrokes. Wu Jian’an gave a simple explanation early on in the development of the series. “Visitors of all kinds are invited to the studio to play a brushstroke “game”. They can freely pick the size and type of the brush, as well as choose the density of ink and colors in order to write a single brushstroke on a sheet of Xuan paper in whatever style they choose, without creating a recognizable image or character… In traditional Chinese painting, brushstroke are highly regulated. As in a hierarchical society, only a limited number of accepted brushstrokes can be used. 500 Brushstrokes offers equal opportunity to all manner of brushstrokes, orthodox or not, all can go into an artwork. This creates a variety of previously unimaginable relations. Combinations consisting of “bad” strokes often compose incredible images.”

Consequently Wu’s combinations of individual brushstrokes are as far as could possibly be both from traditional Chinese calligraphy which evidences the continuous movements of the calligrapher’s hand and from Western artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey or Brice Marden who have responded to Asian calligraphy in highly individual ways.

The skill with which the individual strokes have been collaged to the surface on which they coexist also adds another dimension to the viewing experience. In a description of 500 Brushstrokes #10, 2016, that has recently entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, reference is made to the way in which the individual strokes are “collaged into the larger whole using traditional Chinese conservation techniques which allow for nearly seamless layering of paper on paper.” On multiple levels, then, these festive works are not what they seem – not calligraphic, not expressive of a meaning, not painted directly on a flat surface but rather organized by a masterly hand in a manner that fools the eye and delights the mind.

CHAMBERS FINE ART - ARTFARM

Salt Point, NY

www.chambersfineart.com

Chinese Photographer Rong Rong at Chambers Fine Art, New York

Rong Rong

Contemporary Photography From China

Chambers Fine Art, New York

January 23 - March 10, 2001

Chambers Fine Art presents twelve photographs by the Beijing artist and photographer Rong Rong. Many of Rong's photographs are staged in the ruins of urban Beijing, the remains of historic homes destroyed as developers forced families out in the early nineties to make way for modern buildings. Those who live in Beijing often visually tune these ruins out. They walk past them between the newer developments, treating them as urban blind spots.

In these empty lots with half destroyed homes, the once private dwelling spaces of families are now dilapidated and exposed for public viewing. The presence of a family is felt through their absence. The crumbling walls reinforce this feeling of absence. It is to these settings that Rong Rong adds torn photographs of movie stars and damaged posters of fashion models. Sometimes, the posters appear to have been left behind by former inhabitants, as if they where once part of the private home decor that is now made public. Other times, the effect is more like collage, where the insertion of a picture within a picture by the artist is very apparent. It's the juxtaposition of the images that provides tension to the art. The appearance of other photographs in these pictures of interior spaces turned inside out are like stand-ins for the human figure; it is their presence and relationship to their surroundings that suggest meaning.

On one level, the photographs appear to be a recording of a moment in history, like a photojournalist documentation of a scene witnessed. The gray tonalities of the black and white photograph with hand-dyed colors add to this historical effect. Li Xiantang, Beijing's most-renowned art critic, says Rong Rong's photographs "are both sad and optimistic, like a fairytale, he poeticizes reality. Rong Rong's pictures possess twisted beauty, they appear natural but contain a vivid contrast." 

CHAMBERS FINE ART

210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001

www.chambersfineart.com