Dual Exhibitions by Shi Zhiying and Jian Ce Opened at White Space Beijing

TEXT:Sue Wang    DATE: 2014.6.17

DUST AS LIGHT - SHI ZHIYING Solo Exhibition

Dust as Light - Shi Zhiying Solo Exhibition

Dust as Light is the third solo exhibition of Shi Zhiying, showcasing her oil paintings over the past one year. Shi continues to strengthen her trajectory in practice, in a void of the real world dislocating agony and confusion. By applying brush strokes as a sensory tool, the artist approaches the most illusory outlines of all matters - light. The aura of the light appears as the outline of the parent body ever since the origin of the time. Everything is going back to the form of dust no matter what kind of symbolic significance it has ever been given.

Dust as Light includes three paintings from "White Stone Buddha" series, and Shi's latest works "Pantheon", "The Pyramid", and "The Temple of Heaven". Depicting Buddha is the artist's daily practice. As time accumulates, the transformation through repetitive practice generates a profound power that balances with the loose and purified airy atmosphere created by the strokes, to enrich the weightless light, and to defend hollowness. There is equality in principle between the man-made statues as abstract pivots for spiritual minds and architectures of power as performing stage for classes and systems. No immortal lasts forever, neither does art. Shi Zhiying takes the body of light as a measure of power, explores and exposes the most fundamental unit of the existing substances, as well as the dialectical relationship between visualized objects and meaningful illusions.

About Shi Zhiying

Shi Zhiying was born in Shanghai, China in 1979. She graduated from oil painting department of Shanghai University Fine Arts College in 2005 and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Her recent major exhibitions include My Generation: Young Chinese Artists in Tampa Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, USA.

About the exhibition

Duration: June 14-July 30, 2014

Venue: White Space Beijing

Opening hours: 10:00-18:00 (Tuesday-Sunday)

Tel: 010-84562054

Add: No. 255 Caochangdi, Airport Service Road, ChaoYang District, Beijing

Third Eye, 2014, Acrylic and Marker on Canvas, Thread, 230x200cm

Third Eye, 2014, Acrylic and Marker on Canvas, Thread, 230x200cm

Projection - Jian Ce Exhibition

WHITE SPACE BEIJING is pleased to announce the opening of the third solo exhibition of Jian Ce on June 14, titled Projection, where her latest paintings will be presented.

The exhibition theme addresses a basic idea in traditional optics. Projection refers to Leon Battista Alberti's optical theory of the Renaissance, which describes the relationship between the natural world, the human eye and the picture plane, at the same time providing artists with a handbook and instructions on how to create a perspectival image. The paradox between perspective and our actual visual experience is the main problem Jian Ce discusses in her works.

By setting a vanishing point and a fixed standpoint for the viewer, as well as distorting objects within its system, the perspectival image transforms the natural human experience in order to achieve a more 'truthful and accurate'description of reality. The problem of this aim is something Jian Ce tries to reflect critically in her artworks. Drawing on pictorial techniques that were in use before the photographic era, such as compositional principles and grid structures - which are now applied in virtual computer images - Jian Ce creates an internal system within a picture. As images, the abstracted landscapes overcome their dependency on photography and disrupt our viewing habits shaped by photographs. In her figurative works, Jian Ce reduces all personal emotion in order to build up an abstract composition with the basic elements of painting, finding a form by systematically deducing it from the picture plane, thus evoking an 'inherent expression'.

About Jian Ce

Jian Ce was born 1984 in Shandong, China, and moved to Germany in 1988. She graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts in the master class of Georg Baselitz, Daniel Richter and Robert Lucander in 2008. She graduated from the Humboldt-Universität and Freie Unversität Berlin with a Magister Artium degree in Art History in 2009. From 2006-2007 she studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Presently, she is a PhD candidate in Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Universität, working and living in Berlin and Beijing.

About the exhibition

Duration: June 14-July 30, 2014

Venue: White Space Beijing

Opening hours: 10:00-18:00 (Tuesday-Sunday)

Tel: 010-84562054

Add: No. 255 Caochangdi, Airport Service Road, ChaoYang District, Beijing

Courtesy of the artists and White Space Beijing.