REWARDING PERSISTENCE
An award by two cultural institutions in Beijing gives artists who persevere a chance to showcase their talent, Lin Qi reports.
Meng Boshen’s current one-man show at Beijing’s Today Art Museum, which runs through Wednesday, features only two site-specific installations whose materials are entirely natural: One is a tree suspended in midair and the other is a pile of stones spread over the ground.
The two works at Observing Reality through Smears are Meng’s latest productions that continue the 38-year-old Beijing-based artist’s distinctive work approach — using black pencils to smudge all over the surface of the objects in his creation.
“Once I used pencils to try to draw as precisely as I could, but I found that what I depicted was not real but an illusion,” he says.
“Now I enjoy the repetition of strokes covering the objects in black, and in time I immerse myself in a world of pure blackness and an austere style of work, through which I find inner peace.”
In Suspension, chopped parts of a tree that Meng found at a demolition site in a Beijing suburb are hung in midair.
The other work River shows cobblestones carefully arranged on the floor. The tree chunks and the stones were all smudged using pencils.
Meng uses this slow, seemingly meaningless approach to express an attitude against the hustle and impetuous mood of society. Further, he explores the relationship between one’s belief and social development, and between people and nature.
Li Xianting, a prominent art curator, says the fallen tree in Suspension makes the audience relate to a lot of other trees that share the same fate thanks to the fast-paced urbanization; the tree symbolizes not just its kind but the lives of people influenced during that process.
River, which Meng created earlier this year, derives from his curiosity about the sky and stars. So, he collected dozens of stones, and he arranged them to resemble a dry riverbed or the Milky Way. And he mixed them with Yuhua stones, a special kind of pebble unique to Nanjing, Jiangsu province.
Li says by smudging the
If you go
stones, Meng evens out the differences between ordinary cobblestone and the Yuhua stone, a popular tourist souvenir.
“The act of smearing covers the glitter of the stones ... It is a metaphor that to nature, all stones are equal, and all lives are equal.”
Meng’s exhibition was made possible thanks to pledges by two cultural institutions in Beijing — the Today Art Museum and the Wang Shikuo Foundation — to support Chinese artists who have persisted for more than a decade.
To this end, they established the annual Wang Shikuo Award in 2016 in the name of Wang Shikuo (1911-73), a painter and professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
The award is given to artists aged between 30 and 45. And as part of the award, the works of candidates of the year and the winner of the previous session are exhibited.
And it also promotes to the general public that spirit of persistence held dear by Wang Shikuo, making them better understand of how hard an artist works.
Meng won the award last year. And his exhibition is being held along with a parallel one of this year’s 12 nominations on the short list.
Gao Peng, the director of the Today Art Museum, says the award and the exhibitions are to provide a platform for those who are creative, thoughtful and yet whose works do not win instant recognition on the market.
He says this year’s finalists embrace a more experimental spirit in a wide range of mediums and their works demonstrate a depth of thinking that addresses underlying problems in social development.
Zheng Da, 39, who lives in both Wuhan, Hubei province, and Seattle, was picked as this year’s winner at a ceremony on Sept 22.
An avid video game player and designer, Zheng says he is fascinated with new developments in technology. And his interactive installations explore how electronic technology is reshaping people’s social habits and their attitudes to the virtual and real worlds.
But he avoids overuse of technology in his work. Rather, he prefers the so-called “low tech” forms, such as video games and mobile messaging, which he believes are more accessible to the public.
“Art and science are like twins. They are both made by people, reflecting human creativity and also a progressing perception of the world,” he says.
Wu Dayong, a trustee and founding member of the Wang Shikuo Foundation, says the award plans to launch a residence program abroad for winners next year, providing artists a broader vision and the chance to show their works to international art circles.