Xing Wanli participates in the exhibition "ERA OF ENCORE" at Beijing Times Art Museum
ERA OF ENCORE
Xing Wanli
2024.06.08-2024.09.01
Beijing Times Art Museum
Titled ERA OF ENCORE, the exhibition seeks to broaden the discourse surrounding artists born in the 1990s. Against the historical backdrop spanning from the late 1980s to the present, it establishes four coordinates of observation: art and cultural history, the driving forces and impacts of technology, social realities and issues, and aesthetic innovation and rebellion. The exhibition is accordingly divided into four sections: Farewell to Modernity, Digital Natives of the Future, The Field of Society, and Dopamine Returns. Through these overlapping themes and frameworks, it explores the practices of China’s youngest generation of artists.
ERA OF ENCORE Installation View
For ERA OF ENCORE, Xing Wanli presents two new works, Childhood’s End I and Childhood’s End II. His work draws on the nonlinear narrative structures found in literature and engages with the relationship between the materiality of the signifier and the psychological representation of the signified in semiotics, translating these concepts into visual form. Drawing on experiences from everyday life, he rearranges and transforms textual elements into scenes centered on the theme of “memory.” His compositions emphasize the interplay between text and visual imagery, as well as sensory experience. Fragmented elements correspond to inspirations drawn from daily life, forming a series of open-ended visual schemas that trace the process of transformation from reality to prefiguration and subsequent documentation.
Childhood’s End I
2024
Oil on canvas
151 × 106 cm
The artist explains:“While working on these two paintings, I found myself unable to predict the outcome of the next brushstroke. The most important thing I could do was to focus my eyes entirely on the small area surrounding the point where the brush met the canvas, following the emerging, still-unknown direction of the forms with each successive stroke. I waited to see whether the area I was painting could hold its own within the composition as a whole. The process often required me to retrace my steps several times.
However, the forms that emerged through repeated layers of paint often gave me a headache. I spent a great deal of time adjusting them on the canvas to make them appear more coherent, but more often than not, these efforts ended in failure. I was therefore compelled to seek out and rebuild the foundations of ‘form’ all over again.Seen from a more positive perspective, the intertwined paths between these patches of color are complex and ever-changing, and each fleeting moment of stillness sparks associations with unfamiliar shapes. The process is unpredictable, much like the various forms clouds assume in the sky. At certain moments, they may evoke memories and experiences from my past. Of course, these impressions may also arise from my misreading of certain forms. In any case, I believe that ‘appropriate’ forms always arrive quietly, accompanied by unexpected turns of events.”
Childhood’s End II
2024
Oil on canvas
216 × 152 cm
