Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on June 12, 2008 of Blog It: New Wave of New Wave. Curated by Leo Xu, this exhibition brings together the work of three young artists—Guo Hongwei, Tang Yi, and Shi Jing—who work in the traditional disciplines of painting and drawing. Although the three artists work in widely different styles and have divergent interests, Xu observes that they all belong to a generation in which rigid categorization has been broken down by the omnipresence of the Internet. Rivaling any formal training they might have received is the free-wheeling deluge of texts, pictures, sound and video available in the era of Web 2.0 and blogging.
As Xu observes: “Today from the Internet community to ordinary citizens, it is not only language that finds itself drastically revolutionized by the spawning abbreviations and acronyms as well as Internet slang and rhetoric, but also the diversity of art and culture which is made possible with the efforts of this blogging community throughout the world. Living through this Web 2.0 age, a younger generation of Chinese artists, whether they blog or just read blogs, are thrilled to be able to speak in their own voices, whilst they may still keep learning to survive amidst tides of the refreshing aesthetics and concepts which were and probably are not shared by their precursors.”
Rejecting the strident manner and political content of many of the generation of painters who emerged after the ’85 New Wave movement painters such as Guo Hongwei and Shi Jing create works that are hauntingly ambiguous in content. Guo’s monochromatic painted images of adolescents are blurred by washes of oil and water and achieve effects reminiscent of faded family albums. Shi chooses distinctive motifs – the holy mountain Kangrinboqe in one canvas, a Rembrandt self-portrait in another – but elects to obscure their familiarity by painting in closely related ranges of tones so that the image is only visible from certain angles, appearing and disappearing as the spectator walks past.
Unlike Guo and Shi, Tang Yi does not choose to obscure her subject matter or reject color in her baffling paintings. Channel-hopping from curious image to another in her visual conundrums, she evokes the non-sequential sequence of images that Xu contends parallels the ceaseless flow of images in the cyber world.
前波画廊北京很荣幸地宣布展览《Blog It：新的新浪潮》将于2008年1月19日开幕。本次展览将呈上年轻艺术家郭鸿蔚、汤艺、史晶 在油画、绘画传统艺术形式内的作品。策展人许宇认为这三位艺术家虽然风格迥异、兴趣不同，但是同属于网络泛化、弥消分类的一代。而Web2.0及博客写作带来的文字、图像、声音上的自由表述的洪流正冲击着他们所受的正统教育。
如策展人所说：“今天对于网络群体乃至普通百姓，不仅语言本身因网络的语汇和修辞而发生着巨大的变革，文艺的多样性更因全球博客群体的努力而化作可能。Web2.0时代的中国新生代艺术家们，无论参与博客写作或是阅读，都难掩获得自我表述的兴奋，即便他们仍在新美学、新观念的浪潮中摸索前行，但这种美学和观念不论昨天还是今天都未为被其前辈使用。”
郭鸿蔚、史晶摒弃了85新潮一代对尖锐手法、政治主题的运用，他们的作品内容更具朦胧的隐蔽性。郭鸿蔚的单色绘画用油与水滴模糊了青少年的肖像以求渲染出陈年家庭相册的气息。史晶则尝试了不同的主题，如圣山冈仁波齐和伦勃朗自画像。这些作品以相近的色调铺陈，达到陌生化的效果，进而观众需要在特定角度才能观看，画面则随观众移位时隐时现。
不同于郭鸿蔚和史晶，汤艺在其令人费解的画作里既没有模糊主题也没有放弃色彩的运用。策展人指出，通过跳跃性强、谜语般的视觉语汇，她实现了类似网络世界不间断的影像流一般的非序列的序列影像。