Chengdu
Zhang Xiaogang's Solo Exhibition “Mirror of Illusion”

Exhibition period: 2024.01.06-2024.04.07

Opening: 2024.01.05

Venue: Scheide - Chengdu Fosun Art Center

The mirror of illusion projects the real theater of the artist's mind, in which there exists a constant theme of paradoxicality in the perception of things. In the opposition and entrapment of memory and forgetfulness, fiction and truth, reality and surreality, illusion and nightmare, familiarity and strangeness, private and public; experiencing remoteness in closer things, and summoning back from remoteness to the most urgent reality.

Mirror of Fabrication, 2016

oil on canvas

60cm x 50cm

Literature, this time, serves as a medium for approaching Zhang Xiaogang's inner mirror, a beam of eyes through which to glimpse the personality behind the artist's pictorial style, what kind of complex and intertwined cultural genealogy constitutes the artist's spiritual history, and how to arrive at the space-time picture constructed with metaphors and symbols.

Mayfly Diary: July 10, 2020 - Dialogue, 2020

oil on paper with paper and magazine collage

79.5cm x 99.5cm

This exhibition showcases representative works by Zhang Xiaogang created in different periods since the 1970s and associated with literary imagery, as well as this year's new works that have never been shown to the public. The artist has transformed a specific space in the Fosun Art Center in Chengdu - a stairwell - into a magical, as if time and space are in disarray gallery - filled with his diaries, essays, letters, sketches and other private notes. The space seems to transcend the existence of reality; it introduces the viewer to a world of imaginary images dominated by reading, perception, and association.

​About the Artists and Curators​​

 

张晓刚

Graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1982; now lives and works in Beijing. Since the 1990s, Zhang Xiaogang has used a cool, introspective and daydream-like artistic style to convey the collective psychological memories and emotions that characterize the times. This paradoxical presentation and simulation of society, the collective, the individual, as well as family and bloodline is a reinterpretation from the perspectives of art, emotion, and life, with a strong contemporary significance, and is the best embodiment of the worldly Chinese context embedded in contemporary art.

His works have been exhibited in a series of important group exhibitions at home and abroad, including the Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale (Bronze Medal), Gwangju Biennale, Asia-Pacific Triennial in Australia, Shanghai Biennale, etc., and he has held solo exhibitions more than thirty times in many art museums and important institutions at home and abroad.  Hong Kong M+ Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, OCAT Art Center, Taikang Art Museum, LONG MUSEUM and other domestic and international art museums and important institutions. 

 

鞠白玉

​​Art writer and media personality. He is the host of Artnet's art review column and “The Forest Hollow” podcast; the planner and host of Tencent's first large-scale documentary series on contemporary art, “Show”; the main lecturer of “Look at the Ideal”, “Getting rid of the Charms - Introduction to Contemporary Art” (Global Contemporary Art after the 1980s). The first large-scale documentary series of Tencent introducing contemporary art, “Show”, curated and hosted by “Look at Ideal”.

2024.01.06 - 2024.04.07
Fosun Foundation (Chengdu)
Artist
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