Leo Gallery Hong Kong is delighted to present Memory, a group exhibition featuring worldwide artists working with various media, including Chen Chunmu, Jorge Mayet, Li Yiwen, Nathalie Decoster, Raymond Hains, Shi Zhiying,Yan Bo, Zhang Xuerui and Zhao Yiqian.
Memory aims to connect the flow of energy between the creative languages of the selected contemporary artists, creating interesting echoes and correspondences.
Chen Chunmu’s works showcased the theme of warmth and complex feelings of vision, hearing, smell, taste and tactile senses. The fantastic and seemingly complicated painting is actually simple, he paints what he conceives, and the illusive sights are poured onto the canvas.
Jorge Mayet has uprooted himself from Cuba in the mid-1990s and now settled in Brazil. His work explores the themes of dislocation and migration, as well as conveying the feeling of homesickness, disillusion, and disappointment a deported exile might endure.
The nostalgia seen in Li Yiwen’s work seems like either a way to relieve the anxiety of reality, or else a technique of self discovery. Li used pigments to further copy these electronic strokes and to revise his previous works. With new perceptions and experiences superimposed on the old images, the experiences and memories from different periods are superimposed on each other.
Nathalie Decoster approaches different themes in her works: Human relationship to time, the share of thoughts, the comparison between the life of the man and that of the nature. Through her creations, she makes us aware of the absurdity of our lives as modern humans and gives us an access to serenity.
Raymond Hains is considered as one of the most important French Post-war artists. His works constantly challenge people’s perception and definitions of art. Renowned for his torn posters and also a significant series of giant matches.
The way Shi Zhiying illustrates the stones is to create the ambience for the audience to contemplate in a state of simplicity. Not only does she reject to put emphasis on the differences between every stone, but she also takes it further by erasing any possible disparity in terms of their physical characteristics, and therefore the objects she draws become all unified as the same content weighing on the same medium.
Seeking freedom in art forms, Yan Bo uses the mineral material as the foundation in his work; distances himself from the boundary of rectangular or square canvas and creates works in irregular shape. To him, this is how an artist seeks freedom in creation. Every creation process is a wander to the unknowns.
Be them soft as silk or dense as dusk, the rhythmic colors all flow under neat gridlines. Every art piece is an intimate conversation between Zhang Xuerui’s inner world and the canvas; words become hues and shades which are weaved into squares of passion and affection.
For Zhao Yiqian, so many objects are marked with memories, bearing the traces of individual events and past culture. His approach is to take these various everyday appearances (of stories, times, spaces, events and images), and carry out a visual decoding and recoding of them to form a “micro-emotional” painting form, a new micro-narrative of painting.
