The World is Yours, As well as ours

Interesting exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, exploring abstraction in recent Chinese painting.

The Chinese approach to abstraction takes a slightly different form taking Taoist philosophy and calligraphy as two starting points. It feels like a more natural form than the Western Modernist backlash.

I loved Liu Wentoa’s pictures made up of thin pencil lines which interweave to produce pattern and light and shade. It felt a bit like intellectual Spirograph. Qian Jiahua’s work created an amazing 3D optical illusion where it looks like the canvas has large blocks sticking out from it but it’s actually a flat canvas.

Yu Yauhan’s Circle pictures evidently reflected the Yin and Yan in philosophy but oddly I was seeing Renaissance town maps! I think I have now officially brainwashed myself to see everything in a Renaissance context.

Most beautiful were Su Xiaobai’s monochrome works using laquerwork to create an opalescent effect with curves edges giving an idea of them more as an object than a painting.

Closes on 17 September 2016.

 

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