Dedicated to exposing the strongest and most innovative artistic ideas from around Asia, Gajah Gallery is proud to present Chinese artist, Zheng Lu’s first solo exhibition curated by Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, featuring his Image Resurfacing Series.
One of China’s most talented rising artists, Zheng Lu (b. 1978), has come to prominence in recent years for his innovative sculptures and installations. Taking the underlying creation process from his three-dimensional constructions as inspiration, Zheng has delved into new conceptual ground with his most recent Image Resurfacing Series. Reacting to our modern-day passive consumption of images, the artist selects a variety of illustrated subjects ranging from current events to historical figures, and recreates them on aluminum panel using industrial lacquer. After an arduous process of rendering six to seven images, layered one on top of the other, the artist “resurfaces” his work, sanding it down with abrasives in order to expose the layers below. The resulting composition is no longer a representation—it becomes a serendipitous interlacing of history, ideas, and voices: an abstraction. The final surface dissolves the pictorial, and encapsulates what cannot be seen. Only the accompanying time-lapse video that documents Zheng’s process provides evidence of the work’s anatomy. Image resurfacing is neither the artist’s playful repartee with the language of abstraction nor is it merely an enigmatic process of painterly alteration, rather, it is a bold conceptual step that extends the very definition of painting.
Zheng studied at Lu Xun Fine Art Academy from 1998-2003 before moving on to Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Art from 2004-2007. While in school, Zheng won the LVMH Prize which provided the artist with three months training at The Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, ENSBA, Paris. His works have been collected by the Suzhou Art Museum and Long Museum, amongst others.
