Artists: Chris Huen Sin Kan, Li Qing, Elizabeth Neel, Ken Okiishi, Shahzia Sikander, Taocheng Wang

 

“Performing Time” is the second curatorial collaboration between Pilar Corrias Gallery (London) and Leo Xu Projects (Shanghai), following a critically acclaimed exhibition in Hong Kong “The Tell-Tale Heart” (2015) where the relationship between narrative and new media was addressed. The new group exhibition otherwise steers its focus to painting as a medium that has recently gained vigor and repertoire from new ways of image-making, data, and performative languages in a world constantly reshaped by digital media. A product of the galleries’ ongoing opinion exchange on the gestural and time-based nature of Chinese calligraphy and ink painting, the show evaluates the boundaries of painting by and through time: How the notion of time in its physical and metaphysical sense has influenced artist’s respective practices.

 

The exhibition commences with new works from New York-based abstract painter Elizabeth Neel whose manipulation of acrylic on canvas brings abstraction to traverse time and space. Highly dependent on both a substantial degree of chance and the insistence of direction and control, Neel’s paintings draw on techniques that can be linked to a history of gestural abstraction but also to much more ancient forms of calligraphic painting that constitute both image and language for the purposes of informational and emotional communication. The paintings on view summon up a notions of mapping, economy, social dynamics and relationships between intention and space, luck and design.

 

Immediately abstract, Ken Okiishi’s works bound together the painterly traces of a brushstroke on surfaces of flat-screen monitors to play mash-ups of 1990s VHS home recordings of sitcoms and advertisements partially recorded over with sequences from new, digitally broadcast television. Entitled “gesture/data (feedback)”, these glitchy image-objects on the one hand suggest connections between the physical traces of gestural painting and the swipes, taps, and pinches through which we now access digital images, subject to infinite redistribution, and on the other, highlight the fragility and absurdity of our attempts to document human presence—while at the same time affirming that presence. “The tensions between silence and sound, painterly and digital, flickering brushwork and flickering light parody the ideal of ‘presence’ of painting while providing a lively literal substitute. The eye is pulled back and forth between the layers of information and gesture, and among seeing, watching and looking,” – Roberta Smith commented (New York Times, March 14th, 2014).

 

Personal memories and traces of histories unfold on the dimension of time, measuring the velocity of brushwork and art of representation. Hangzhou and Shanghai-based Li Qing projects critical spirits of Chinese literati painting on his painted objects. Exquisitely painted landscapes and collaged prints inside time-worn window frames removed from average local houses, Li’s painting installations embody a time-based intensity in interweaving fictions and realities, sublimities and absurdities. Chris Huen Sin Kan, an emerging artist from Hong Kong, paints with austere color and simple yet determined brushworks on his yellow canvas, resembling the ancient line drawings on rice paper. In so doing, Huen introduces warmth, tranquility and subtlety to the everyday life fully detached from the urban hustle and bustle.

 

The show, as its title suggests, looks at the broadened horizon of paintings where paint, ink, time and performance come into play. Having been based in Amsterdam for years, young Chinese artist Taocheng Wang is known for her hand scroll and performance that tell stories set in various stages in the past and present, exploring the notions of sexuality, identity, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. The video “Reflection Paper No. 1” is the first episode from the series and based on the personalities and writings from Eileen Chang, a legendary female writer from the 20th century Shanghai. It cuts and edits from footages of Wang’s performance and various filmed resources and materials, only to be dubbed by her uncanny whispering and reading of Chang’s bitter-sweet essays “Written on Water” and “The Gold Cangue”.

 

A critical figure in contemporary miniature painting Shahzia Sikander and her animation ‘The Last Post’ enquires into the concept of time as a mix of historic and political markers. Sikander’s practice itself is rooted in the hierarchy within the practice of labor and time, issues of scale, precision and gesture. Developed from hundreds of animated drawings, ’The Last Post’ animation explores the British colonialism of the subcontinent, the British opium trade with China, military rhetoric, news media, identity and other contemporary issues through an aesthetics that draws primarily from Indo-Persian miniature paintings. “I construct most of my work, including patterns of thinking, via drawing”, – Sikander’s ideas housed on paper are put into motion in the video animations and create a form of disruption as a means to engage.