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Artist: LIU ZHIXING

Venue: D06, Middle 2nd St., 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, BJ

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Tong Gallery+Projects is honored to announce that the solo exhibition of artist LIU ZHIXING The Tiny Breath will be open from September 24th, 2022 to October 23th, 2022, during which the artist's latest paintings will be presented. Look forward to seeing you there!

The world forever, I shall not entirely

Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass

Smell of your sleeps

The Night Dances

[USA] Sylvia Plath

"I have noticed the imperceptible impact of sunlight entering the quiet office for a long time...I am a prisoner of passing time! Only prisoners have a keen interest in observing ants and pay such attention to the moving sunlight."

The tiny shape of time and existence, the circulation of eternity, the moments that shimmer like fragments, the gap between time and space, the light that faintly disappears and flashes...

Instantaneous state and relative eternity are a group of relations that fascinate me.

While studying in France, I made a group of paintings called "Éter instant". I took out the base of the exhibits in the museum separately. What was displayed on it was not a classical sculpture, but a small soap bubble. For me, the form and material of the base represent the relative eternity of the sculpture, and the soap bubble that happens to fall on it is the absolute moment of the sculpture. Among the monuments and soap bubbles, what I pursue is an extreme and rational sense of conflict.

The creation in the past two years continues on this topic, but gradually adds more and more elements and becomes more and more "ordinary". Jumping out of the cold and hard marble base, involving time in everyday life: I can also get enlightenment on the eternity of nature and the infinite universe. I found that by pulling away the subtle folds of daily life, eternity and moments can be hidden everywhere.

I paint the soft skin of human body: translucent people, people in water. They are placed by me in the immortal, but fading, dim light. The beads seem to be sliding down, and they also seem to be quietly frozen. It seems that there is a connection between the disappearance and solidification, a kind of indistinct,stubborn fragility and impermanence. Everything happens here and now, and a moment also covers the past and the future.

I paint pearls. It has a hazy luster and a virtual projection around it, which can not be seen clearly and understood. It appears strangely in a seemingly perfect position, as if breathing and inhaling fit together. I always think pearls and teeth are very similar. The body has disappeared, but they can still be preserved for hundreds of years: they are all things that have existed longer than the body or oyster.

Water beads are another symbol of the opposite side：evaporation, dissipation, flow and instability. It's like the water on the back of a duck.

At the beginning of its birth, art is similar to a monument. It is usually a concrete object to prove and record a period of history or life experience, or to explain events or ideas in a metaphorical way. Pearl, water drop, human body. A soft skin bag with pearly beads placed on it; The hard and immortal marble base and the living and dying bubbles floating on it are all props I use to metaphor time. They are essentially the same as the stagnant clock in Chirico's painting, which depicts the frozen time, and the juxtaposition of the dusk and noon sky in Margaret's Empire of Light, which is the deconstruction of the existence of time. In a sense, the juxtaposition of images makes them gain symbolic life, it is a perfect metaphor for finite life and infinite universe, and a static observation of time and existence.

Immortal or instantaneous; Established or collapsed; Imaginary or real. We exist because of space and disappear because of time.

Everything in the world are always presented as opposition of contradictions at the same time.