On June 19,A Thousand Realms, an exhibition by Gonkar Gyatso and Liu Zhuoquan will open at Space Station. It will be the first collaborative exhibition between the Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso who is based in London and New York, and local artist, Liu Zhuoquan.
A Thousand Realmsencompass the life and death of all living beings in the boundless universe. Among the artworks by Gyatso and Liu, emblems and forms gathered from the realm of living beings embody the desires driven by sexual urge, hunger and warmth. They are objects of desire instilled with specific facades, from up above are the worldly emotions, in the middle is the boundless physical world, and below are burning hell, hungry ghosts, beasts, asura - samsara, the cycles of six realms of existence, all the worldly matters, are all present.
During the process of making artworks, Gonkar gathers all paper media around him, collecting political comments, erotic attraction, comic commentaries, financial market, sports and dining, fashion and entertainment and various forms and headlines into his work. The bits and pieces are then pieced together into an eight-meter long sleeping Buddha scroll. The body of the Buddha overlapping with the cycle of life follows the principle of emptiness. One is all, all is one, the realms are infinite, emptiness is empty, transcending good and evil, where only Buddha is the complete glory of all realms.
Liu Zhuoquan’s bottles series on the other hand encompass all. Inspired by his childhood memories of the ashes at Buddha’s altar and the broken glass fragments left in his body, he uses drawing inside the bottle technique – an almost extinct technique, to draw dead bodies, deformed fetuses, monsters, old objects, and the bizarre on the inner walls of the bottle. Even theCompendium Materia Medicais filled with molds that make the work seem ancient and enigmatic. He uses bottles collected from all sources as vehicles to carry these energy, the scales are immense, containing numerous imaginations.
Gonkar Gyatso has participated in the 2009 Venice Bienniale among many other important international exhibitions. For this exhibition, he will unveil the worldSleeping Buddha – Shanghai Lhasa Express. Liu Zhuoquan will show a collection of bottles at a caliber unknown to the public. Space Station is honored to present visual and sensory feat between heaven and earth, thus initiating thoughts on reality and religion under the global economic and political conflicts.
