He sees where there is the deepest obscurity;
he hears where there is no sound.
he hears where there is no sound.
- Chuang Tzu, Heaven and Earth
Leo Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Chen Kai's much-anticipated second solo exhibition in mainland China - In Silence. This exhibition presents Chen’s series of new works from 2021-2022, inspired by nature and the universe. These pieces focus on the compositions and the study of color, conveying his thoughts on the ways of nature, the inevitability of fate, and the relationship between the individual and the universe. In particular, the exhibition will feature a breakthrough painting of a 4-meter panoramic composition, the largest work in the artist's creative career to date.
In 2022, the political and environmental crises on a global scale have continued to escalate, the borderless chaos of fragmented information negatively impacting everyone. In July of the same year, images from the James Webb Space Telescope were released, revealing to the world new depths of the universe in glorious technicolor, a glimpse of purity and possibility. The dipole moment of these facts of reality echo and provoke a longing for tranquility and profundity amidst the chaos of the seemingly never-ending crises. Using painting as the confrontation against exhaustion and powerlessness of the oppressed and disturbing environment, Chen continues the Supernova series that began in early 2020, furthering his method of pointillism as a means of meditation, presenting paintings that blur the boundaries between cosmic starry skies and pure abstraction. Each dot of color stands for delicate emotion and the passing of time, symbolizing the artist's urge to create a world of hope and beauty, and a deeper effort to reconnect himself with the outside world.
In these exhibited series, Chen focuses on the content and form of the painting, making new experiments in composition, tone, and scale of paintings. Continuing the optical mixture technique, Chen's new works from the Supernova series enhance the depth of the paintings. Dots of different sizes, brightness, and saturation interact with each other on dark backgrounds, forming an abstract space with immense depth and mesmerizing texture. Light Variations takes abstract music scores as inspiration. Chen arranges the colored dots in the paintings like musical notes in compositions: forming phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, focusing on the rhythm between the dots to construct the piece, creating a "galaxy of light" with a flowing visual rhythm.
The breaking away from the artist's iconic pointillism as a whole is another breakthrough of this exhibition. Since 2021, Chen has been thinking about how to make changes in his pointillist works. Inspired by the minimalist artist Lucio Fontana, Chen added a straight line to the dense river of stars in the series In Silence. The simple line falls sharply between the colored dots, creating an effect of movement like a meteor breaking through the sky. The artist is amazed by the change a single line can make to the overall painting. By creating a sense of tension in an otherwise quiet, meditative visual atmosphere, Chen re-evaluates the meaning of lines, using them to explore the boundaries between minimalism and maximalism, between the static and the dynamic.
Chen describes the falling meteors as his reflection on the inevitability of fate: that change often happens in a moment of an unexpected accident. Chen attempts to create his version of starry nights, meteors, and the Milky Way through his way of meditation, to capture the changes in our universe. In this sense, In Silence is a space of tranquility, where the greatest sound is in silence, and "all things belong to the one treasury, and that death and life should be viewed in the same way."1 It is also a sincere invitation to all viewers to look deeper and closer at the skies above, gazing at stellar mysteries, pausing the world for a moment, and witnessing the silence and annihilation of the universe. Perhaps it is also at this moment that we can reconnect with each other, with the peace and consolation offered by the precious silence.
1. Chuang Tzu, Heaven and Earth, translated by James Legge
