China Art Projects at Quac Art Space

798 art district

No.2 Jiu Xianqiao Lu

4 – 30 July 2009.

Opening 4.00 – 6.00pm: Saturday 4 July.

Organizer : Quac Art Space China Art Projects

Tel : 010-59789304 135 2074 8897;

Email : quacart@yahoo.com.cn regnew88@gmail.com

NEW CHINESE ART – PHOTOGRAPHY UNMASKED

Exhibition: Catching Light

China Art Projects and Quac Art Space present four artists with very different approaches to using photographic techniques as art – Li Gang, Hu Qinwu, Huang Xu and zhang hongkuan.

Photography is dependent on light to unveil images which can be revealed on treated surfaces but the source and nature of light, the technical process of capturing light and processing the image, shape very different views of the world.

Li Gang uses a range of ‘instruments’ to capture light – from pin-hole cameras to old large-frame cameras with reconstructed bellows. He opens the lens to flooding light and diffused, seeping light, depending on time exposure and aperture. The resultant image is as much dependent on Li Gang’s recognising and using chance and accident to create poetic, often odd, nuances on life.

Hu Qinwu’s photographic work complements his abstract paintings in the common element -the diffused, elusive light appears to glow from within and even behind the surface. He captures street lights, neon signs, car headlights in the city night series and the slick, slippery light floods the surfaces of forms and moves in and through space.

Huang Xu’s forms are dramatically lit, suggesting theatrical, baroque-like scenes. Ironically, what appears as romantically pure images are derived from detritus and waste – in this exhibition the subject is globs of street spit. Light highlights aspects of form which, without reference to scale and size, can be immense or minute.

zhang hongkuan is an emerging photographer from Tianjin now living in Paris. His images of pebble beaches reference the Chinese ‘stone slice’ suggesting light & space in the landscape. His reflections on water become colour and light – the antithesis of Li Gang and Hu Qinwu - moving water creates forms and colours which swirl in and around each other. At times, a greasy, sliding, oil slick, at others, formal abstraction, often to the extent that movement is as much the subject as the forms mirrored on the surface.