2023 - 2023 JINGART

Lin & Lin Gallery is pleased to participate in 2023 JINGART, presenting latest artworks by artists Zhao Zhao, Shen Liang, Xu Hualing, and Liu Shih-Tung. The exhibition shows how artists interpret a diverse contemporary aesthetic in an environment where Chinese and Western culture interact, traces how artists inherit the aesthetic of the past whilst engaging in a dialogue with history from different perspectives and even span the contemporary artistic landscape.

Zhao Zhao uses a variety of media to transform realistic subject matters and artistic forms, focusing on the relation between individual consciousness and social sphere in which he lives. From multiple perspectives, his paintings fusing traditional and contemporary elements will be compared, and the unique development of his art will be explored. Furthermore, Zhao's philosophical thinking, which is positioned between East and West, will be examined, as will his connection to his own culture. His latest works express the geographical and human characteristics of Xinjiang and Central Asia. The work illustrates a feeling about the past and the present that people have changed, but things have remained the same through distorted expressions, presenting a ghostly shadow.

Shen Liang has been thinking about the issues of tradition and daily life and giving diversified contemporary perspective to traditional Eastern literati painting. In Shen's "repetitive painting" approach, he closely observes daily life and combines the spirit of Chinese ink with the medium and technology of Western art. By layering objects, his work reconstructs a world of imagination through Eastern defacement. That seemingly simple depiction constitutes a certain kind of reality beyond the objects. Shen constantly practices to realize the aesthetic tradition that runs in his veins. At this exhibition, Shen Liang presents a new series of work entitled Tender Grass, in which he depicts blossom of flowers in mild colors, echoing the poetic phrase by a Tang Dynasty poet, "A riot of blooms begins to dazzle the eye.Amid tendergrass the horse hoofs can barely be seen."

Xu Hualing's works are inspired by the youthful images of contemporary women and her daily surroundings. All the time, intricate line and pale colors have always been the distinctive features of Xu's works. She consciously avoids delineating the outlines in traditional Gongbi painting, eliminating the edge lines. Instead, she uses light and shade and purposefully weakens the contrast. The pale colors render the blurring of a faint and misty figure. Xu also places the realism of traditional brushwork and the reality of photographic printing on the same surface enriches the hierarchy of the picture. Through the combination of painting and photography, Xu show the world like a daydream in her eyes.

Liu Shih-Tung's works are based on natural and unnatural fragments of culture material collected from daily life. He dismantles and reconstructs the narrative structure and reality of history and memory by using unique and delicate collage and the aesthetics of creation, forming pictures of life memory.  Liu took the images of Chinese antique, and has reorganized time and given them contemporary symbols by applying layers and layers of collage on those objects. At the same time, not only is the painting overflowing with the literati tradition of placing feelings on objects, but a subject-background relationship that belongs to traditional figurative painting also emerges.