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You Won’t Believe It

Exhibition details

Opening / Event Date:
12 March, 2014
Time:
6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Closing / End Date:
8 May, 2014
Event Category:

You Won’t Believe It
Shi Jinsong / Xiang Yun Joint Exhibition
Curated by Janet Fong
March 12 – May 08, 2014

As Hong Kong’s oldest gallery, established in 1974, Galerie du Monde will commence its 40th anniversary celebrations with a joint exhibition by the brilliant Chinese sculpture artist Shi Jinsong and his wife, Xiang Yuen. This is their first joint exhibition and entitled, “You Won’t Believe It”, it will be staged from March 12 to May 08, 2014, with the artists present at a cocktail reception on March 12.
Shi Jinsong and Xiang Yun were high school classmates who fell in love, got married and had children… Everything happened in a steady routine, in all its trivial yet concrete details. An ordinary life of two ordinary persons. You won’t believe they have been making art all this time, turning an ordinary existence into art and their profession.

Their artworks are their everyday life. In facing the daily unfolding of uncertainty that is life, one must respond to it out of instinct. There is no time for thinking, no room for symbol or metaphor in this reaction. One cannot transcend the mundane… You won’t believe it, no matter how I explain it!

Shi and Xiang had to move their studio constantly. After having settled in the same place for two years, they had to move again as their studio was demolished. They had no choice but to pick up the pieces of broken walls and trees and to build a garden elsewhere. A “Qian Chuang Yuan” that braces their inner world, and the ever-shifting ones like “Piao Yuan”, “Another Garden”, “Pine Tree Garden”…

In recent times, Shi has been working on an artwork that is inspired by Jinhuidui . He uses “freshly brewed tea, condensed ink and leftover wine” to paint on Xuan paper certain trivial and discarded daily objects, especially ones that will soon vanish such as fish bones, pig bones and shrimp shells… The remains of these creatures that sustain our existence are resurrected in art. Painted in freshly brewed tea at daybreak, or leftover wine at midnight, or ink residue from the side of the inkstone, these objects come to life with a graceful vitality on paper. It is a kind of redemption for both the creatures and the one who lives a mundane existence…

As a mother, Xiang divides her time between her children, family, and painting… between everyday reality and her loves. Living through these fragments of time that are her days, she focuses on smaller sized works, stealing a moment here and there to indulge herself in the joy of painting.

Xiang cuts photos and copies of famous paintings into pieces, selects one or more pieces at random, and replicates these images in ink with her unique flowing-stream brushwork. It resembles the calligraphy practice of the literatis who copied the masterpieces. Beyond practice, the copying is a spiritual exchange and an emotional release. Every time the calligrapher picks up their brush, they find themselves in a different physical setting or emotional state. While efforts are made to restore the order of the original works, they cannot illuminate the original paintings or photos in their entirety. Bearing in mind the uncertainty of time, however, these blank spaces in the images are another kind of visual contribution of Xiang’s works. When these paintings are presented as individual works in public, the series becomes an abstract concept in which each piece makes a lively subject. It echoes the relationship between the concept of people and the autonomous individual.

Xiang paints not only to create a scene, or a traditional painting as defined by iconology. The act of painting becomes a goal; her way of life becomes art. The everyday is elevated and embodied with spiritual value and meaning.

Whether you believe it or not, Shi and Xiang that believe their daily effort enriches both their life and the world. They believe this is their life of art, spirit and materiality!

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