Tang Contemporary Art is honored to represent "Sync in progress…" on Nov. 19th at Beijing 1st gallery space. Curated by Michela Sena, this group show includes works by Geoffrey Bouillot, Jon Burgerman, Mona Broschár, Nina Bachmann, HIMBAD, Helena Margrét Jónsdóttir, Nirit Takele, Tang Shuo and Albert Willem.
Painting, in particular figurative one, not only survives but develops in ever more current forms; that is what we intend to convey with this exhibition.
The resilience of painting represents, not simply, that vital, uncontainable urge to continue along the chosen road, despite everything; it entails the ability to decipher “the contemporary” and translate it into meaningful and visionary codes.
It was only afterwards, when the "dry" conceptual art of the 90’ and, more recently, digital media, pulled the curtain down and told the world that painting was over, that "new figurative" has became the best artistic language to understand how contemporary culture has transformed over the last few decades.
In fact, the power of painting depends on neither the artist’s skill nor the viewer’s experience, rather it is the real answer to the new aesthetic codes of contemporary life, ciphers that develop independently.
In other words, what we appreciate in a painting depends on neither us nor the painting, but on the tuning in of aesthetics with certain aspects of our society.
The peculiarity of contemporary painting is not to be found in its technique or material practice but rather it is a mental and psychological approach to the visualization of our reality.
The artists on show, all part of the new generation, share a common point of view. Their focus has moved away from the subject, taking it by a different foreshortening. By placing the emphasis on language, instead, it develops into a new kind of contemporary “artistic slang”.
Illustration, graphic design, street art, comics are all part of the great wealth of experience with which these artists finally arrive at figurative painting.
They were born and raised in a society where digital animation is inspired by realistic painting, a visual world where the aesthetic of video-games takes its cue from post-apocalyptic scenarios of religious iconographies.
Even social media, like Instagram, focus on a sense of pictorial composition in every post to have it shared and recirculating.
That’s the way how painting develops in forms more and more current, on a path parallel to our socio-cultural conditions, it manifests in different ways and media, sometimes very far from its own tradition.
Curator
Michela Sena
Michela Sena is a Rome-Bangkok-based curator and art critic. Her research relates partly to the potential of global language and the relationship and dialogue between contemporary artists coming from different territories. After she graduated in museology and art history at Roma Tre University and got a Chinese language degree at SISU Shanghai Foreign Studies University, she was Director of Primo Marella Gallery Beijing and Director of Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok. She curated a wide number of shows proposing a punctual snapshot of contemporary art research, developing in recent years a focus on Chinese and southeast Asian art.