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22 September – 10 October 2023Opening Reception: 22 September, 4 – 7 PM6F, Kunsthalle, K11 MUSEA, Hong KongGalerie Marguo is pleased to present Traces of Love and Timeless Adventure, an exhibition of new and recent paintings and sculptures by Chinese artist Ziping Wang at K11 MUSEA in Hong Kong. On view from 22 September to 10 October, this also marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Greater China.Drawing on the visual languages of advertising and illustration, Ziping Wang creates paintings and drawings inspired by the overwhelming experience of living within an attention economy in the digital era, in which we are relentlessly bombarded by pop-ups, banners, notifications, and endlessly refreshing feeds.For the artist’s first exhibition in Hong Kong, which features a suite of new paintings, drawings, and for the very first time, sculptures, Wang meditates on the process of selection and parsing information itself, which humans do involuntarily to make sense of the world.
Ziping WangTeardrop is a shattered heart, 2023Oil on canvas100 x 80 cm (39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in) -
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Ziping Wang
I don't understand the concept of regret, 2023Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in) -
Ziping Wang produces confounding compositions that flatten the hierarchy of disparate, competing images and flit between the familiar and dissonant, challenging the tendency to equate representation and meaning.Similar to the technological interfaces through which we increasingly navigate the world, Wang’s paintings at first glance appear elegantly explicable and legible, but are in fact structured so as to encourage doubt and difficulty.
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Ziping Wang
Dancing under full moon light, 2023Acrylic paint on stainless steel
157 x 109 x 90.5 cm (61 3/4 x 42 7/8 x 35 5/8 in)
Weight: approx 60 kg -
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Faced with the massive tableau The last page of book, one is invited not to look but rather swim through their densely saturated vistas of amorphous shapes, samples of food packaging, pixelated retro gaming graphics and art historical quotations. Each viewer is invited to chart their own path through the surplus of visual stimuli, in their own order, according to their own inner narrative mechanism.For Wang, this exercise is a form of conversing with the future viewer, creating a cascading flow of choices and communication, an endless chain of code or some mycelial network of visual stimuli.
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Ziping Wang
The last page of book, 2023Oil on canvas
160 x 120 cm (63 x 47 1/4 in) -
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Tutorials of becoming a tree, Running into everlasting feast, and Each cursed seed is another pearl do away with commercial graphics all together. Rendered from no preliminary sketches or preselected imagery, they feature instead oneiric interior landscapes; compositions of forms and color that each obey their unique laws of space, contained by borders, windows, and cels. A reference, possibly, to the tenuous membrane between external influence and inner life.
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Yet, with this series the artist begins to cleave a separation between the processes of embodied and algorithmic selection. The multicolored compositions such as Hope disappears in daylight are undercut by monochromatic scenes in blue and gray, which unlike the carefully plotted reproductions of found imagery, are rendered intuitively by the artist, with no preconceived plan.
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Ziping Wang
Midnight adventure, 2023Oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in) -
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The trio of fine cross-hatched ink drawings, by contrast, are devoid of imposed structure, developing organically from one form to the next, evocative of the conditional statement in programming: "if this, then that".Constituting an image-bank of sorts, the shapes and objects discerned in these studies reappear in the intuitive strips of Wang’s larger paintings. Viewed all together, Wang signals a reality we are faced with now more than ever - the question of who, or what makes the choices that determine what we desire, what we feel, what we look at and consume.
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Ziping Wang’s dizzying paintings and drawings explore the overwhelming experience of living within an attention economy in the digital era, in which we sift and wade through endless pop-ups, notifications, reels, photos and refreshing feeds.
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Ziping Wang
Warmth of cobalt, 2023Oil on canvas
200 x 150 cm (78 3/4 x 59 in) -
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Portrait of Ziping Wang.
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