“Re-sist-ance”, Zheng Lu’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Shanghai, comprising six of his new works produced in 2016, is held at Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai and it remains on view till December 21, 2016.
The title "耳且", pronounced “erqie”, is the morphological composition of "阻", meaning “resistance” in Chinese, in other words, any mechanical force that tends to retard or oppose motion. In general, “resistance” is synonymous with “obstacle”, as was said by Liang Qichao, a renowned Chinese scholar during the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China, “Everything in this world meets resistance, and we call it a success when resistance is crushed.” Moreover, this coinage, homonymous with “and” or “also” in Chinese, generates a new sense of parallel and progression, turning therefore the exhibition into a kind of exploration into the aesthetics of resistance.
“Shiosai”, Zheng’s solo exhibition at MOCA, Taipei, in 2015, and “Transition” Zhenglu’s solo exhibition at Parkview Green Museum marked a new stage in his art. During his search for new media and material for art, he found that, the six categories of Chinese characters, i.e., self-explanatory characters, pictographs, pictophonetic characters, associative compounds, mutually explanatory characters and phonetic loan characters, give each stroke the opportunity to participate in the semantic and imagery fields, rather than being something isolated. So does his image-making system. All the seemingly isolated material, images, symbols and logic, transform one another to make something virtually real whose constituents keep converting themselves into their opposites.
This solo is more concerned with the time series, space and change, which explains the artist’s effort to move from the poetics of image-making to the philosophy of image-making. Aiming at freeing himself from the conflict between the sensory experience and the concepts, he heads for liberal expression of the inner conflict. Nothing about human life or the world is absolutely clear or definite, and any landscape or spectacle has its reason of being, so you may run into a “natural” landscape, but it may well be an illusion only. Emerged in the pervasive universe, we experience terror or excitement, but we would still suffer as an idealist if we go back to our origin – it is doomed to be a tragedy, whether we return to the past or go toward the future.
About the exhibition
Dates: Oct 28, 2016 — Dec 21, 2016
Venue: Long Museum
Courtesy of the artist and Long Museum, for further information please visit http://thelongmuseum.org.
