Breath Crystals

The relationship between words and objects signifies the relationship between people and the world they live in. Lan Zhaoxing's new exhibition “Breath Crystals”, with her latest paintings, sculptures and installations, shows how the poetic nature of words can be condensed in the artist's infinite imagination to create the energy of life's expansion.

Continuing her exploration of the Path in the Forest in Traveler, Lan Zhaoxing still walks in the silent call of nature. On the one hand, she keeps getting close to the real world represented by forests and trees, and encounters new landscapes in the “original nature”, from which she evokes various memories related to her individual experience. On the other hand, the artist also walks side by side with the philosophers and sages represented by Heidegger in her thought, opening up a new hiding place for her to return to. In her pursuit of poetic rationality, wisdom and beauty, she returns to the “object” itself——especially the characteristics of the material, and her creations from “wood” continue to play out in this exhibition, revealing that the works of the artist have a similar process to that of the “wood”, and reveal that they have been created by the artist in the past. In this exhibition, the creation from “wood” continues to undergo a process that reveals the possibilities that the works can reach in various spaces.

The Silent Contemplation in Spring brings new paths through time and space amidst lushness in a window-like manner, branches and green lines extend new life in Darkening Growth,from The Injury of Reading to Their Cusps Question Each Other, we can see how Lan Zhaoxing continuously subtracts trees, in the process of eliminating the main body, make full use of different material language to create a sense of contrast between reality and fiction. The box-like frames, like window frames, emphasize the boundary between illusion and reality, as José Ortega y Gasset once wrote: “Window frames are important for windows, just as they are very much like the borders of paintings. The oiled canvas is the porthole of the imagination that penetrates the muted solidity of the wall. Thanks to these intimate 'windows' into which we gaze, they are the exit of illusion.” This logic highlights the close connection between the work and its spatial environment, and in the exhibition space, the wall becomes another framework to separate the work from the real world, and in more mediums, Lan Zhaoxing's “breathing” “crystals” exist in a way that is more transcendent to the flat space. In more media, Lan Zhaoxing's “crystallization” of “breath” exists in a way that goes beyond flat space.

Lan Zhaoxing loves sculpture, although after graduation she has been exploring oil painting and paper, we still see that the artist has never stopped searching for the line in sculpture in the context of painting. However, as painting cannot leap out of the surface, shallow relief sculpture becomes one of Lan Zhaoxing's choices. She chooses the gentle, simple and full-of-life wood material to transform the spatial language, and presents the “Lonely Hut” under the indistinguishable time and space with the planarization of the low starting position of the form and the large compressed space. Lan Zhaoxing uses twilight and the night sky as the main colors, giving the space for independent thinking from a calm and cool perspective, taking over the “spiritual freedom” she felt from Carl Gustav Jung, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein and others. A lonely symbol of “spiritual freedom”.

Emotional restraint is expressed to the extreme in Wild Fire, also the title of Lan Zhaoxing's first exhibition, only this time the bright red and yellow tones collide with the lines, and the fierceness in the burning is sealed on the surface of the triangular-shaped three-dimensional structure, where wildfire, the enemy of vegetation, is transformed by the artist into a twin entangled sculpture in wood. The handling of weight and lightness returns to the “human” itself in sculptures such as On the Other Shore of the World made of iron, and the reconstruction, bending, polishing, and carving of wood and iron are all ways in which the artist utilizes the materials to give voice to her work. We can see from the structuralist artists that they only use the essence of the material without any other references, and we can also see from the minimalist artists the continuation of the non-personalized means and the borrowing of industrial products. Lan Zhaoxing is concerned with the evolution of social life since the Iron Age and the time change it implies. The liquid flowing under the high temperature can condense into a more ductile form with a free gesture, which forms another echo with the wood after cutting. The artist follows the life of each material and finds the entry point to read their language. When the intrinsic nature of things is uncovered, the artist is able to transform that nature into a medium for actual visual presence.

Lan Zhaoxing often writes poems, recording the world that touches her in a subtle but sudden way. “Transforming poetic language into real objects, applying materials in a conflictive and dramatic way, and letting the works have more relationships with them on the basis of a deep understanding of space” is an important direction that the artist continues to explore. In Homo Sapiens, she made Michel Leiris's forehead wrinkles extend into waves across the picture, and black traces like broken curves run through Shining Time, making the distance between Proust and the audience of different eras more and more distant. Looking back to the Renaissance, Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) intentionally weakened the relationship between the figure and the background by focusing on the volume of the figure and the treatment of the contour line, thus shortening the visual space, and the adjustment of the light source to give the flat painting a sense of relief. Lan Zhaoxing directly chose shallow relief, paying special attention to the color block of the figure's light and the structure of the form in the background of the transition, but also through the creation of rich texture, increase the rows of lines and shadows to achieve a more natural articulation. As Adolf Hildebrand (Adolf Hildebrand) once put forward in the Form Problems in the Plastic Arts: “The idea implied by the form, considered expressive, is not due to the space, but lies in the organization of the structure, function, or movement, and thus it is only after the idea of space is established that it acquires in art as a fundamental concept only then did it acquire a place as a fundamental factor in art.”

Lan Zhaoxing often reads a large number of texts, imagining the creator's appearance from the statements and then visualizing the image in her works. For example, in the case of Proust, we can of course access the corresponding photographic portraits on the Internet, but in Lan's work, the photographs are only a reference to the outline of the form. Her treatment of the figure's facial features is clearly an attempt to construct more possibilities in the image, thus expanding the picture with a broader connection to the many works in the exhibition. Lan Zhaoxing's poems linked with the titles of her works suggest that each work presented in Breath Crystals is a partial word in a poem. As the audience watches and thinks about the interaction, the authentic experience of life is urgently sought after.

Wood as a material is one kind of object, and the works based on it are another kind of object. Paper, the object that carries words most widely, is also made of wood pulp, and the artist's consciousness is like an “intermediary” between the work and the material. Lan Zhaoxing perceives how the consciousness of time and the image of human beings are fused in the cycle of words and objects. Different textual paradigms are born out of their own specific existential backgrounds, and the artist's intentionally chosen nodes of day, afternoon, and night imply the course of time, and maintain the balance of mutual enrichment between the works. However, Lan Zhaoxing does not really present the reconstruction process according to physical time; the entities transformed with the images reveal the self-sufficient colors she has unearthed in her inner spirit, and when the works are exhibited, they acquire a universal communicative function just like circulating texts, and the audiences enter into a dialogue through viewing, and embark on a personal journey of coexistence together with the creator.

——by He Xiao