Tong Gallery+Projects is honoured to announce that it will participate in the offline exhibition of the 2020 Beijing Contemporary Art Expo from September 25, 2020 to September 30, 2020, presenting the photography and painting works of Cai Dongdong, Liu Silin and Zhang Xinyi.
From social networking to International political events, Celine Liu’s works are a reflection and reproduction of this era’s symptoms, with their performance internalizing different facets of the contemporary world. She created works that reveal the paradox of photos as a truth-revealing media. And through staging, rehearsal and role exchange, she blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, daily life and ritual, private and public spaces. Either in the form of photography or live streaming, the artist used her personal image as a media of communication, to explore and demonstrate “in person” the fate of images in the Internet Era.
/Zhang Hanlu
In the age of image explosion, these photos are left to lie idle, as if they are chicken ribs that I don’t want to throw away. Like a surgeon, I performed an operation on these photos by observing them and digging out the dramatic structures or even another space hidden inside. I used different methods-bending, polishing, collaging, burning or combining with related objects, to form these photo-sculptures. I did everything possible to save the images and give them new life. Such creation blurs the boundary between the sensation of touching and perceiving an image and tries to create an extension of a photograph. By calling into question the relationship between images and viewers, I create photos that break free from the designated relations and loosen the illusion brought by them. When images become a pure object, the photo becomes a tangible place.
/Cai Dongdong
It seems that cities in the first half of 2020 have hit the pause button, with deserted streets as quiet as those in Hopper’s Nighthawks. It is said that this painting's inspiration came from Hemingway’s short story The Killer, which tells the story of a pair of criminals who enter a restaurant seeking to kill a target. I try to divide this kind of crisis into two space-times, in which nothing seems to happen other than Sisyphean's endless repetition, but there is fate in the coincidence.
/Zhang Xinyi
Guy Debord says in his theory The Society of the Spectacle that, vision in this landscape is the most powerful means of communication; the public is no longer pursuing the truth, and people simply need to read pictures. As art becomes an image script for information storage, how should people perceive these images in the face of the vast history of art? Based on these thoughts, I tried to digest the role of images as a script and embedded the simplified images in the visual experience in the Era of the Internet.
