西岸 | WEST BUND

Re-sist-ance/Zheng Lu

2016.10.27 - 2017.01.08 16:00 - 19:00

Exhibition

	2016.10.27 Thursday - 2017.01.08 Sunday 16:00 - 19:00

Opening Ceremony	October 27, 2016
Duration	October 27, 2016 – December 21, 2016
Location	Long Museum (West Bund)
Curator	Peng Lv

“Re-sist-ance”, Zheng Lu’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Shanghai, comprising eight of his new works produced in 2016, will be held at Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai on October 27, 2016.

The title "耳且", pronounced “erqie”, is the morphological composition of "阻" , meaning “resistance” in Chinese, in other words, any mechanical force that tends to retard or oppose motion. In general, “resistance” is synonymous with “obstacle”, as was said by Liang Qichao, a renowned Chinese scholar during the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China, “Everything in this world meets resistance, and we call it a success when resistance is crushed.” Moreover, this coinage, homonymous with “and” or “also” in Chinese, generates a new sense of parallel and progression, turning therefore the exhibition into a kind of exploration into the aesthetics of resistance.

《三千烦恼丝》

“Shiosai”, Zheng’s solo exhibition at MOCA, Taipei, in 2015, and “Transition” Zhenglu’s solo exhibition at Parkview Green Museum marked a new stage in his art. During his search for new media and material for art, he found that, the six categories of Chinese characters, i.e., self-explanatory characters, pictographs, pictophonetic characters, associative compounds, mutually explanatory characters and phonetic loan characters, give each stroke the opportunity to participate in the semantic and imagery fields, rather than being something isolated. So does his image-making system. All the seemingly isolated material, images, symbols and logic, transform one another to make something virtually real whose constituents keep converting themselves into their opposites.

This solo is more concerned with the time series, space and change, which explains the artist’s effort to move from the poetics of image-making to the philosophy of image-making. Aiming at freeing himself from the conflict between the sensory experience and the concepts, he heads for liberal expression of the inner conflict. Nothing about human life or the world is absolutely clear or definite, and any landscape or spectacle has its reason of being, so you may run into a “natural” landscape, but it may well be an illusion only. Emerged in the pervasive universe, we experience terror or excitement, but we would still suffer as an idealist if we go back to our origin--- it is doomed to be a tragedy, whether we return to the past or go toward the future.

《耳且》&《不留》

About Artist

Zheng Lu

Zheng Lu was born in 198 in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia. He had a BA and MA from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts (Sculpture Department) and Central Academy of Fine arts (Sculpture Department). In 2005, he won L.V.M.H. Young Artists’ Awards in France, and thus had the opportunity to study in Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

Recent years has seen Zheng gradually setting up and improving his own logic and vocabulary in art on the basis of practice and experiment. Substances, scripts, water, time, space, and a number of concepts are included into his aesthetic world to form an organic whole, from which derives his unique renderings. In the meanwhile, his works are also metaphoric of the diversity and the possibility of life, as well as of our response to the relation between nature, the self, and the ego.