“With Nature”

Artist: Fang Lijun, Daniel Eskenazi, Nicolas Chow, Hong Ling, Zhao Meng, Zeng Xiaojun

Curator: Crystal Cheng

2019/04/06--05/26

Soka Art, Beijing

In the Eastern culture, "nature" not only refers to the wilderness and forest, but also describes a free and simple attitude towards life. Taking the simplistic natural state as the source of beauty, extracting the spiritual essence through the concrete surface, and obeying the philosophy of "Taoist Nature", together constitute the very essence of the ancient Chinese literati spirit. The six artists presented by Soka Art each plays an important role in the international art world. With profound understanding in Eastern culture and Western modern art, each of them explores the possibilities in defining "nature" on the aspects of Eastern and Western philosophy, history and sociology, adding their multi-composite modern translations to the ancient literati spirit.

Few people can better understand the aesthetics of oriental antiques than Sotheby's Asia chairman Nicolas Chow. In his black and white photography, every piece of ancient Chinese cultural relics is given the temperature of humanity—with their magnified texture which almost appear as human skin, these ancient objects are transformed into sensual imageries which relate to the audience in a personal and emotional manner. Daniel Eskenazi, who also comes from a world-class art collector family, introduces the rational and scientific perspectives of the West to literati aesthetics. He discovers, deconstructs and reassembles all kinds of material elements in nature with sensitivity, and re-presents them in a perceptual form. Speaking of the passion of natural elements, the Beijing native Zeng Xiaojun pays more attention to the precipitation of history: after an exposure to vast collection of ancient Chinese antiquities during his years in US, he returned to Beijing and began the search of his roots in the millenary traditional culture of literati, by using the texture of the unique twisted-body porcelain from Tang to capture the arteries of ancient culture. Coincidentally, Zhao Meng, an artist and a research scholar at Harvard University, chooses to use the stone of nature as an inspiration. He uses clay to mimic the shape of stone and makes references to the idea of "transformation" in the book <I Ching> , such as the rough texture of the cracks implies the connection between elegance and roughness and the twisted lines suggest the great force of nature imbedded in the dripping water. Regarding the respect for nature, the artist Hong Ling, who has lived in Huang Mountain for many years, has the deepest understanding in the unity of nature and man. He combines the traditional Chinese painting style and technical methods from Western oil painting to create an a spiritual aesthetic originated from the Eastern culture, making a significant continuation and innovation of Chinese Shanshui culture. Moving from Huang Mountain to the modern city, Fang Lijun, the representative of China's cynical realism, truly lives as a literati of the current era. His "shaved head" image created in 1988 has effectively attacked the boring, dull and helpless living conditions in Chinese society since the late 1980s, which cynically captures the generational demands for spiritual freedom.

Soka Art · Beijing will hold the opening of the group exhibition “With Nature” on the afternoon of April 6th, which will be attended by the featured artists. The exhibition is curate by Ms. Crystal Cheng, and will present a series of painting, photography and sculpture from 6 renowned international and Chinese artists.