| Recent modernization of the whole world has had a profound impact on all aspects of our lives, from our eating habits to our way of thinking, to our attitude toward traditional values. It has prompted me to reflect on our living space. I have attempted to understand, through visual means, finer details of these significant changes that have affected our traditional society. |
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Zhang Qi-Kai is a Beijing-based artist.
Zhang Qi-Kai, Red Square, 2008. Installation, mixed media, 170 x 170 x 260 cm. Courtesy of the artist.Recent modernization of the whole world has had a profound impact on all aspects of our lives, from our eating habits to our way of thinking, to our attitude toward traditional values. It has prompted me to reflect on our living space. I have attempted to understand, through visual means, finer details of these significant changes that have affected our traditional society.
What I particularly like to do is to identify conflicting aspects in different situations and bring together contradictory strivings into some kind of conjunction of opposites. I like to observe the mysterious process of these contradictory movements sometimes clashing among themselves, sometimes peacefully coexisting, and sometimes entering a state of perfect harmony. In this complex world, one’s emotions are being constantly affected, albeit to different degrees, by paradoxical perceptions emanating from conflicting situations. How do you make sense of this? The interpretation is ambiguous. Do you focus on the figure, or do you rather focus on the ground, where the figure is situated? When you see a black dot on a piece of white paper, do you perceive it as a black dot surrounded by white space or do you see it as a white space ending on a black dot?
In my work, I employ a great variety of materials. I like to discover transcendental dimensions behind a material and let a dimension generate further dimensions through interaction with other materials, and even more dimensions through the viewer’s perception of these interactions. The success of the whole process hinges on how much the concept lends to being expressed by visual means. This delicate relationship between the concept and the means of expression is sometimes more concrete, other times less concrete. When people say that they cannot understand a contemporary work of art, there are two possible explanations. Either the work is meaningless in itself, or viewers cannot relate to the message immanent in the work due to their lack of understanding of the means that is employed. What I have always striven to achieve is that my work acts instantly on visual perception, emotionally and cognitively, so that my interpretation of the situation instantly resonates with that of viewers.
