Summer Group Show

Liao Guohe, Ou Jin, Tie Ying, Xing Danwen, Xue Feng, Ye Linghan, Zhang Peili

Boers-Li Gallery New York is pleased to announce Summer Group Show. Works on view will include new paintings by Liao Guohe, Ou Jin, Xue Feng, and Ye Linghan, Xing Danwen’s Urban Fiction (2006), as well as Zhang Peili’s historical installation piece, One Thousandth of One Second to One Second (1995).

Due to the popular demand of our previous exhibition, Ulay: Renais sense, a selection of Ulay’s works will remain on view in the gallery in tandem with the Summer Group Show.

Liao Guohe (b.1977, Changsha, Hunan Province, China)

Known for the fictitious, irreverent, and often satirical approach of making perverse, bold and even offensive images, Liao Guohe draws an array of subject matters that is unspeakable to the point of requiring “self-censorship”, into his paintings. Among his latest artworks, Liao focuses particularly on the macroscopic issues of Chinese politics and society. Among them, the notion of “justice” has been one of Liao’s central themes, and his multi-faceted visual presentations of this very notion in his work continue to challenge the threshold of moral and ethical values. Moreover, Liao Guohe has become increasingly keen on playing with the subtlety and discrepancy between the written words and letters and the visual components of the painting. This is also a central device in deciphering the semantics and its relationship to visual representation.

Ou Jin (b.1978, Ningxiang County, Hunan Province, China)

Ou Jin places his works in an open, dynamic linguistic structure to integrally change modes of artistic expression. He applies paint layer after layer and waits patiently for the countless levels of pigments on the canvas to dry up. This segment of the artist's activity refers to the artisanal spirit of classical Chinese object-creation/craftsmanship: humans' physical bodies, objects and time jointly take effect in a certain setting, which relates to a ritual sense of arts and crafts, as well as to the concept of the "body" in performance art; afterwards, he takes readily designed computer-generated icons and inserts them in a special device to make them into three-dimensional cuttings, with the different layers of pigment taking on a rich, three-dimensional visual effect. This kind of visual effect reminds audiences of "abstraction", but actually the significance of the works extends far beyond that of abstract art.

Tie Ying (b.1971, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China)

According to Tie Ying’s definition, painting, which describes an action, is a summary and statement about things in the world. An untrammeled painting language is used not to invent something new, but to extract, reinvent, and exaggerate the languages already existing in the history of painting. It is also probably an act of deconstruction - to disconnect those classic scenes traditionally related to one another, so that each painting has more of an independent existence.

Xing Danwen (b.1967, Xi’An, China)

Trained as professional painter at Central Academy of Art, Xing Danwen came upon the photographic medium in the late 1980s. Since then, she has become one of the few artists at the time who were dedicated to exploring the boundaries of photography as artistic medium. Through the camera, she makes observation of social environment and questions issues rooted in the Chinese society, humanity, female identity and collectiveness. After receiving M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001, Xing Danwen has been engaged in multi-media practice including photography, video, and installation. Xing has participated in numerous prominent international exhibitions, including Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, International center for Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1st Yokohama Triennale and Sydney Biennale 2004, etc. Her works are among several public and private collections, including Whitney Museum, Pompidou, International Center of Photography, SF MoMA, The Fonds national d’art contemporain, the Progressive, Groupe Lhoist, etc.

Xue Feng (b.1973, Zhejiang Province, China)

Xue Feng’s work shows in a rich manner our contemporary mindset towards nature and its politics of artificiality, framed in an articulated vocabulary of both Chinese and western painting traditions. Born in the 1970s generation, Xue Feng is considered one of the emerging artists able to consolidate his promising and ambitious position. Best known for his dark atmospheric canvases, where dense layers of brushstrokes exude a somewhat unnerving sense of excessiveness and loss at the same time, Feng brings together, in a challenging manner, two of the most defining and opposing painting traditions: Chinese traditional landscape painting and experimental western modernism. This has resulted in an unprecedented, authentic visual language which is at once conceptual and visually articulated.

Ye Linghan (b.1985, Lishui, Zhejiang Province, China)

Graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2009, Ye Linghan is the recipient of the 2009 Luo Zhongli award. His works have been exhibited at the Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, the Tampere Film Festival, Finland, the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia, the Shenzhen Animation Biennale, Holland Animation Film Festival and various private galleries in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea and Brussels. Ye Linghan’s works examine the principals of visual compositions and the role which time plays in ways of seeing, inviting viewers to contemplate on the notions of reality and fantasy. The Lucy-X series is based on the imagery search result of the word “Lucy” on the Internet. A “PC layered logistics” defined by the artist is used for the making of these works - a new way of thinking from the daily use of PC software.

Zhang Peili (b.1957, Hangzhou, China)

Zhang Peili graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in 1984. In 1985 and 1986, he organized and participated in the "85 New Space" exhibition and artist collective "Pond Society" activities. His major works include X? series, 30X30, Water: Standard Version from Cihai Dictionary, Document on Hygiene No.3, Last Words and A Gust of Wind, etc. Zhang is mainly engaged in multi-media works with video, text, sound installation, mechanical installation and photography, along with art education. Zhang participated in Venice Biennale three times, and his works have been shown in several prominent international exhibitions, such as Lyon Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, etc. He held solo exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and recently, S.M.A.K., Ghent. His works have been collected by prominent institutions, such as Museum of Modern Art, New York, Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, and so forth.