A2Z ART GALLERY PRESENTS LATEST CREATIONS OF GU XIAOPING, A NEW REFLEXION ABOUT CHINESE SOCIETY’S MUTATION BY TRACING THOUSANDS OF CHINESE INK LINES ON CANVAS AND PAPER. THIS EXHIBITION WILL BE OR- GANISED WITH ARGENTINIAN FOUNDATION OF SOUTH AMERICAN CULTURE.
Lines. Thousands of lines drawn in Chinese ink, parallel and tightly pressed against each other, cover the canvas or the rice paper. To obsession, until this repetition of the same gesture reproducing each line with a beginning and an end extracts Gu Xiaoping from this world and plunges into a second state. That makes us think of Sisyphus pushing the rock indefinitely to the top of the hill. But contrary to the founder of Corinth who had defied the Olympus’ gods, Gu Xiaoping neither summon here the absurdity of human’s condition, nor refer to a vain action. His reflection is elsewhere, and his technique gives us a first key: he uses the car- penter’s instruments, which are used to mark the wooden planks, to create art work. A purely utilitarian and mechanical gestures, is the basic thing to make an artistic gesture. Thus, Gu Xiaoping affirms clearly his will to dissent from the traditional world of art, because if the Chinese ink is one of the pillars of Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, it takes a step side to create a break. Here, the lines free themselves from the function of real. They vibrate and seem to dance according to the intensity of the gesture and the pressure of the artist’s hand. This page of an invented writing could be an abstract landscape as there is something hypnotic in this work, where ghostly shadows appear, but this visual wave may refer more to a music, a score that it would be enough to play by pinching these compact strings to reveal the crystalline sonority of the paintings.
THE ENGAGEMENT LINE
If the artist calls his works “Ink Lines in Motion”, we truly find the idea of movement and freedom linked to a operating mode which the artist makes alive. We can understand a hyperbola translating a certain normalization of the society’s thought. The industrial world has arrived at the massive reproduction of impersonal objects, slipping us into the mold of standardiza- tion. The artist is like a lookout or an oracle of modern times and alerts us. Gu Xiaoping has posed as an ob- server of the mutation of Chinese society since the 1990s, but he initiated this artistic research only 5 years ago, when he left Nanjing to go to Beijing. There, he felt a shock of contemporary art’s world as he did not know it. He used to multiply many mediums such as performance, installation, photography, video and painting. To- day, he deconstructs the relationship between image and meaning in order to introduce a new path. His paint- ings are genuine “murmurs”, as defined by theorist Wang Min’an.
Translated text from André Palermo,
Translated text from André Palermo,
“Beaux Arts Magazine”, may 2017, p. 139.