Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok is proud to announce the opening of “Suspended, Undecided” on November 15, 2018. The exhibition will present the work of China’s eight most experimental contemporary artists.

 

As an independent presence in the world, art constantly incorporates new practices, emotions, and ideas. Through self-renewal, the artists break through former boundaries and definitions to expand their territory. Alain Badiou once said that everything is suspended and undecided in contemporary art. He believed that suspending everything and bringing it to a critical decision point is the essential goal of contemporary art. From the diverse work of these eight artists, the viewer can see how a feeling, an event, or an experience gives rise to distinctive linguistic features and creative methods, establishing an ever-expanding vision of contemporary art.

 

In the late 1980s, Zhu Jinshi had a brief encounter with a Cy Twombly painting at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. He was drawn in by the sudden colour on the canvas that appeared to have been surrounded by the void. During that period, he was attempting to reconsider his oeuvre through “anti-painting” method, and his “thick paintings” evolved from this experience; he presses, drags, pushes, scrapes, and layers thick pigments to create undulating three-dimensional space on the canvas. Through the relationship between the form, density, and colour in these layers, he evokes emotion and imagination in the viewer, and presents a distinct form of artworks that transcends our monolithic impression of abstract art.

 

Cai Lei is a young artist, whose practice always focuses on perspective and serves both as the starting point and subject of his thinking and imagination. He extracts the contours of perspectival space or parts of everyday architecture, thereby transforming a strange physical structure and framework into an object. The works are still hung on the wall, but they retain their three-dimensional structure as relief sculpture, even as they preserve the viewing relationships and planarity of painting.

 

In contrast, Zhao Zhao’s works are never simply visual outcomes; they are perceptions of reality produced by a series of incidents. In his series Constellations, holes are produced in the glass by bullets and the cracks spread in all directions from those bullet holes. The energy of the explosion is amplified as it spreads outward. In his ongoing Sky series, Zhao Zhao has refined the blue of the sky into an abstract turbulence.

 

Chen Yujun has always been interested in regional culture and character. His Map of Asia collage series stems from the unique cultural background of his seaside hometown in southern China. The lives of migrants from neighbouring countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian countries, the mosaics with quintessential Islamic aesthetics, and a religious nature result in the endless mirror images and constant fragmentation of Chen’s Map of Asia.

 

In Wang Yuping’s eyes, the magnificent interiors and exteriors of the tuk tuks driving down the streets of Thailand not only possess a Southeast Asian character, but they are also spots of nostalgic atmosphere in the city. He painted the tuk tuks in warm and bright colours from the driver’s perspective, facing the street as cats scurry across the road. Wang uses an unusual painting language in distinctive manner to produce rich magic in his works.

 

Yang Jiechang’s work examines the current state of contemporary society and changes in values from the international perspective. As a result of his unique identity – the artist has been living in Asia and Europe - and the massive changes in the global landscape that have taken place over the last twenty years, Yang’s work reflects on current social and political events. He thoroughly considers and analyses the interactions and shifts of global points of difference and assimilation as culture develops.

 

In a time of rapid, blinding change, the artists sensitively perceive the doubts and unknowns that abound in the outside world. In Yan Lei’s Colour Wheel series, concentric circles with rich, brilliant colours and dazzling visual effects reflect the casual pairing and consist of several hundred colours in the chromatographic system according to different logics and sequences. The colour wheels impart a colour theory that seems to portray the objective reality and overall value system of art but are actually full of falsehoods and human manipulations.

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Rather than calling Yang Yong a prophet of the end of the world, it could more appropriate to suggest that he is an ordinary urban "creator" that constructs visual dreams for the entire country. Yang Yong's work has shown us a new approach and emotion, unknown cultural value orientation, trivial, repetitive, boring urban daily life, sensitive, fragile nerves and fascination with pain. It also blurred the language boundaries between virtual and real. Yang Yong's work introduces us to another reality of the world from a unique and apparently peripheral viewpoint.

 

These eight artists use their practices to weave a bond that links different cognitive models, expressive forms, and personal emotions. The boundaries of this community are free and open; when merged with new realism, they give birth to different visions.

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