.....
The Tilton Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of two solo shows by Chinese artists Feng Zhengjie and Zhao Gang on May 10th, from 6-8pm. In Feng’s first solo show in New York, his striking portraits of contemporary women will be on display. Gang, in his second show at the Tilton Gallery, will show his playful and provocative take on classic Chinese composition. Both artists’ work will be on view until June 16th.
In the spirit of Warhol’s screen printed celebrities, Feng’s generic portraits of women are influenced by promotional imagery. His futuristic pop style combined with his exotic color choice exudes a recognizable commodified glamour, one that causes his work to be discussed as a capitalist critique. The women in his paintings are neither western nor Chinese in appearance, but rather a hybrid of commercial beauty, a science fiction product of globalization.
Inspired by the popular images he grew up with in rural Sichuan, Feng’s glamorous females are rendered with the hauteur and glory once used in official portraits of Chairman Mao. The massive scale of his work is a replication of the billboards that inspired him, but unlike these advertisements his images are bereft of text and product references. By removing these distractions, Feng magnifies the fantasy appeal of his ultimately unattainable images. The incorporation of these consumption-based sentiments with his refined painting technique glorifies the allure of advertising as epic, enduring and empty. As political power makes way for economic might, Feng’s work chronicles China’s new ruling class – consumers.
Like Feng, Zhao’s work fuses provocative subject matter with a ribald sense of humor. His oils blend the carefree with the satirical, and are influenced by imagery of the Cultural Revolution as well as the Chinese avant-garde art movement that has emerged since the Open Door Policy. He unlocks what has traditionally been serious and rigid in Chinese art, and opens it up with his loose, un self-conscious, and enticing painting style. The slight disconnect that emerges gives the viewer a sense of forbidden pleasure – an austere heritage has been turned inside-out.
Zhao freely uses exaggeration, mockery, and counter-mockery, to turn the iconic absurd and the absurd iconic. Through his replications of traditional Chinese ink paintings in oil, he calls attention to the process of recreating these well-known images, challenging the authority of the recognizable and formerly reliable aesthetic information. This is further emphasized by the cheeky one-liners he scribbles on his canvases.
