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Following Yang Shaobin’s environmentally-themed solo show Blue Room, he returns to UCCA to curate Only Her Body, an exhibition of luminous landscapes from talented young painter Kong Lingnan. This is the eleventh in UCCA’s series of “Curated by…” exhibitions, which aim to foster a new generation of Chinese artists by pairing them with established artists and guest curators. |
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“Kong Lingnan’s style is deceptively simple, in that all of her canvases evoke the vast panorama of planet earth, yet they still remind us of how small and insignificant we are in the big scheme of things.”
Kong Lingnan, Only her body, 2011. Exhibition Scene, Photo Credit: Danny Chen, Courtesy of UCCA
Only Her Body
Yang Shaobin
Following Yang Shaobin’s environmentally-themed solo show Blue Room, he returns to UCCA to curate Only Her Body, an exhibition of luminous landscapes from talented young painter Kong Lingnan. This is the eleventh in UCCA’s series of “Curated by…” exhibitions, which aim to foster a new generation of Chinese artists by pairing them with established artists and guest curators.
In her hauntingly minimalist paintings, Kong Lingnan shines a light on our conceptions of beauty, nature, prosperity and progress: “If we try,” she writes, “we can cast off our human blinders and see the planet not in terms of good or evil, not as beautiful or ugly, but simply as a body— only her body.”
UCCA Director Jérome Sans notes how the artist’s unique technique in forms, and is informed by, her subject matter: “Using nothing more than regular oil paint and a painstaking application of color, Kong Lingnan creates a ‘neon effect’ that gives mountains, valleys, glaciers and ice floes an eerie, otherworldly glow. But not even these distant, isolated regions are immune to the depredations of human activity: everywhere we look, we find tiny human figures […] leaving behind the detritus of their tools and technology, seemingly oblivious to their impact on the landscape around them.”
Exhibition curator Yang Shaobin feels that “the appeal of Kong Lingnan’s work is the way it transports familiar settings, people and objects into the realm of the dreamlike and unreal… She channels the natural world or natural universe in the direction of her own interests, and uses the female body as a metaphor for the planet or the cosmos.”
Kong Lingnan’s style is deceptively simple, in that all of her canvases evoke the vast panorama of planet earth, yet they still remind us of how small and insignificant we are in the big scheme of things. “Mountains, human figures and inanimate objects are depicted as glowing outlines,” writes curator Yang Shaobin, “as if the artist were sketching the human circulatory system; the body’s veins, arteries, vessels and meridians flowing, pulsing, pausing, stopping, drifting through the dark empty silence…”
UCCA Director Jérome Sans concludes that this exhibition “reveals the bare bones of a much larger story: that with everything we do, we are altering the contours of this planet, chipping away at the only body she will ever have.”
The “Curated by…” series is free to the public thanks to the generous support of Bloomberg. Exhibition dates: April 1, 2011 – May 22, 2011.
Kong Lingnan, Ghost, 2010. Oil on canvas, 120 x 90cm, Courtesy of the artist
