Moderacy
Dec 10, 2022 - Jan 20, 2023
Dec 10, 2022 - Jan 20, 2023
Press Release
Moderacy
Opening : 2022.12.10（Sat.） 3 p.m.
Artist: GU Xiaoping
Curator: LEE Janguk
Whitebox Art Center
GU Xiaoping is going to hold the third solo exhibition ‘Moderacy’ in the White Box Art Museum after ‘Ink Lines in Motion’ in 2016 and ‘Inspiration by Observation of Forms’ in 2019, which will be opened at the White Box Art Museum in Beijing 798 Art District at 4 p.m. on December 3, 2022. This exhibition will display the abstract experimental works of Gu Xiaoping's ‘Moderacy’ series created from 2020 to 2022.
‘Moderacy（均值）’ is a continuation of the series ‘Ink Lines in Motion (行走的墨线)’ from 2013 to 2019. The artist fills the screen with a way of pulling the rope with endless repetitive movements. This work uses ink ropes (墨斗) used by carpenters in China to pull strings full of paint (pigment) and leave lines on paper or canvas cloth to complete the work.
Through this work, he created his own unique shape by expanding the screen to extreme lines by simplifying the patterns. This unique creative technique follows the tradition of literary painting in that it aims to train the mind through a painful, time-consuming repetition of refining and training the mind throughout the process of painting.
GU Xiaoping, the artist of this individual exhibition, is also one of the artists named "China Avantgarde Utopians" who constructed his world with his own technique.
Opening : 2022.12.10（Sat.） 3 p.m.
Artist: GU Xiaoping
Curator: LEE Janguk
Whitebox Art Center
GU Xiaoping is going to hold the third solo exhibition ‘Moderacy’ in the White Box Art Museum after ‘Ink Lines in Motion’ in 2016 and ‘Inspiration by Observation of Forms’ in 2019, which will be opened at the White Box Art Museum in Beijing 798 Art District at 4 p.m. on December 3, 2022. This exhibition will display the abstract experimental works of Gu Xiaoping's ‘Moderacy’ series created from 2020 to 2022.
‘Moderacy（均值）’ is a continuation of the series ‘Ink Lines in Motion (行走的墨线)’ from 2013 to 2019. The artist fills the screen with a way of pulling the rope with endless repetitive movements. This work uses ink ropes (墨斗) used by carpenters in China to pull strings full of paint (pigment) and leave lines on paper or canvas cloth to complete the work.
Through this work, he created his own unique shape by expanding the screen to extreme lines by simplifying the patterns. This unique creative technique follows the tradition of literary painting in that it aims to train the mind through a painful, time-consuming repetition of refining and training the mind throughout the process of painting.
GU Xiaoping, the artist of this individual exhibition, is also one of the artists named "China Avantgarde Utopians" who constructed his world with his own technique.
Curator Article
均值 Moderacy
GU Xiaoping(顾小平) is an artist who has been active in experimental avant-garde arts since the 1990s, and moved to Beijing around 2010 to continue experimenting with avant-garde arts such as new performances and painting. In particular, the virus series (病毒, 2005) which are works of art that display a series of artificial or naturally created patterns of the artist in repetitive forms[ GU Xiaoping’s 《高一些，再高一些 Higher, than Higher》1999, 《你好, Hello》2001 can be included.] and flat installations, later linked to his ‘Ink Lines in Motion (行走的墨线)’ from 2013. Through this work, he created his own unique shape by expanding the screen to extreme lines by simplifying the patterns.
This exhibition is a series of works named ‘均值 (Junzhi)’ from 2020 to 2022. ‘均值’ has the meaning of ‘Average, Mean’ in English. Amongst them, ‘Mean’ means ‘moderation (中庸)’ in Chinese. Moderation is a rule of conduct[ It was claimed by Zisi (子思) of China and by Plato and Aristotle of Greece.] with neither excess (過) nor scarcity (不足) in moral theory, and the artist's term ‘均值’ signifies that the action lies between the two extremes, but is not a quantitative average value, but in the position of the best (最善性), which is consistent with moderation.
‘均值’ is a continuation of the series ‘Ink Lines in Motion (走的墨线)’ from 2013 to 2019. The artist fills the screen with a way of pulling the rope with endless repetitive movements. This work uses ink ropes (墨斗) used by carpenters in China to pull strings full of paint (pigment) and leave lines on paper or canvas cloth to complete the work.
The fruit of GU Xiaoping's abstract experiment the structural screen of the 'overlapping line', is the result of meticulously planned mental labor and the determination of hard physical labor. First, traditional Chinese paper, Xuanzhi (宣紙, Xuan paper) or canvas cloth is fixed, and a thread of ink or paint is drawn from the ink bottle to create a line on the screen. It is repeated from left to right at regular intervals as measured by a ruler, and from right to left without end. That work carries on until the artist is satisfied. Countless vertical horizontal lines drawn by the artist appear in different forms related to the uniquely textured screen.
In the process, cracks in the screen, that is to say not only well drawn lines, but also the texture of the paper and the fabric itself, and the physical properties of the ink or acrylic pigments from the ink line naturally settle down. GU Xiaoping’s display is woven by means of tools, materials and actions visible on the construction site. The lines that are drawn as if tailored becomes the background and creates unique physical properties of the screen and cracks add depth through the unique act of the artist to "pull and fill permanently."
Removing traces of small squares (which you don't know if you don't observe the screen closely) by repeating the act of constantly filling paint in place indefinitely, the screen becomes the sum of a different latticework with different rhymes (韻律). Through the process of monotonous and laborious repetition, his monochromatic screen succeeds in acquiring infinite timeliness and universality. This unique creative technique follows the tradition of literary painting in that it aims to train the mind through a painful, time-consuming repetition of refining and training the mind throughout the process of painting. I would say that the objective of his work is not to show the final outcome, but to show the process of how it is done.
Using the physical properties of the medium, his work stresses the importance of repeating the same process under strict rules, and consequently, he formed a unique space which seemed to penetrate the essence along the cracks in the canvas and paper. The artist replaces this crack with his unique style and depth while achieving the space of healing within the artwork. By doing so, he tries to achieve harmony as if he were to form balance. It reflects the Taoist ethics according to which human beings should pursue their original values by balancing artificial things with the truth of nature, and in this regard, Xuanzhi and canvas, made of natural materials, are suitable mediums to express the simplicity of nature and the formative beauty of purity. It can be said that the artist's faith in 'unity of the ego and the outside world (物我一體)', which is founded on the conviction of becoming one with nature, is indeed passed on to those who appreciate the work.
Kazimir Severinovitch Malevitch and Wassily Kandinsky, who led the abstract movement at the beginning of the 20th century, were from the Soviet Union and Piet Mondrian was from the Netherlands. While the world placed Paris at the center, the great city of the world at the time, all the others were marginal countries. The reality that was presented to them was not satisfactory; it was an obstacle to overcome. The desire for a better world, the desire for utopia, have culminated in abstractions that have erased the face of reality. Russian constructivism artists, like Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin, who followed them, believed that the socialist revolution would be the embodiment of utopia on the ground. Art has forsaken itself in order to build a utopia of reality. However, the dream has been thwarted, and utopia has remained non-existent.
The absence of utopia gives rise to forms which can be considered abstract art, and forms which may be regarded as similar to GU Xiaoping patterns include ‘Pattern & Decoration’ in the 1970s and ‘Neo-Geo’[Art trend in New York City in the 1980s, which is an abbreviation of ‘Neo(新)-Geometric Conceptualism’ as one of the central concepts of simulationism that happened after the mid-1980s. Hal Foster's article on Neo-Geo, or the tendency to be called simulation art, was published in 《Art in America》 (1986, 6) resulted in the rise of Neo Geo seriously.] in the 1980s. These can be regarded as abstract art as it shares the compositional form or method with the preceding abstract form. For example, in Miriam Shapiro’s pattern and decoration artwork, the floral motifs are repeated uniformly and become an element of planetary composition. Peter Halley's work Neo-Geo also follows a long-established form of abstraction known as geometric composition. Nevertheless, they are different from the preceding modern abstract art and uses this distinction as the foundation of existence. Above all, they are distant from the objective of 'inventing a new form' and hence beyond the axis of modern abstract art called 'modernity'. They do not propose a new abstract form, but follow the previous form and choose the direction in which to refer it. Their historical significance is not because they present a new vision, but because they encourage reflection on the previous vision.
If this is the case, Gu Xiaoping adopted the western enformel style as an oriental aesthetics or technique by drawing familiar literary paintings and folk symbols (sign) on Xuanzhi with these tools that have as historicity and modernity based on the Chinese motherlandism(vernacularism, 母国主义), which later extended to canvas cloth. In this regard, he can be evaluated as an artist who consistently explored the spirit and tradition of the East and as an artist who aimed for (established) Chinese Neoplasticism abstract art. In the “House of Utopianism (理想“家”)” exhibition[ 理想“家”(House of Utopianism)：抽象艺术——渴望乌托邦的视觉图像(Abstract art, an iconographic depiction of aspirations for Utopia), 白盒子艺术馆, 北京, 中国(Whitebox Art Center, Beijing, China), 2022.09.23 - 11.26.], I named the contemporary Chinese abstract artists as "China Avantgarde Utopians", as abstract art and utopia are one of the best inventions of the 20th century and are inextricably connected together. GU Xiaoping, the artist of this individual exhibition, is also one of the artists named "China Avantgarde Utopians" who constructed his world with his own technique.
Gu Xiaoping adopted the western enformel style as an oriental aesthetics or technique by drawing familiar literary paintings and folk symbols (sign) on Xuanzhi with these tools that have as historicity and modernity based on the Chinese motherlandism(vernacularism, 母国主义),, which later extended to canvas cloth. In this regard, he can be evaluated as an artist who consistently explored the spirit and tradition of the East and as an artist who aimed for (established) Chinese Neoplasticism abstract art. In the “House of Utopianism (理想“家”)” exhibition, I named the contemporary Chinese abstract artists as "China Avantgarde Utopians", as abstract art and utopia are one of the best inventions of the 20th century and are inextricably connected together. GU Xiaoping, the artist of this individual exhibition, is also one of the artists named "China Avantgarde Utopians" who constructed his world with his own technique.
LEE Janguk(李章旭)
GU Xiaoping(顾小平) is an artist who has been active in experimental avant-garde arts since the 1990s, and moved to Beijing around 2010 to continue experimenting with avant-garde arts such as new performances and painting. In particular, the virus series (病毒, 2005) which are works of art that display a series of artificial or naturally created patterns of the artist in repetitive forms[ GU Xiaoping’s 《高一些，再高一些 Higher, than Higher》1999, 《你好, Hello》2001 can be included.] and flat installations, later linked to his ‘Ink Lines in Motion (行走的墨线)’ from 2013. Through this work, he created his own unique shape by expanding the screen to extreme lines by simplifying the patterns.
This exhibition is a series of works named ‘均值 (Junzhi)’ from 2020 to 2022. ‘均值’ has the meaning of ‘Average, Mean’ in English. Amongst them, ‘Mean’ means ‘moderation (中庸)’ in Chinese. Moderation is a rule of conduct[ It was claimed by Zisi (子思) of China and by Plato and Aristotle of Greece.] with neither excess (過) nor scarcity (不足) in moral theory, and the artist's term ‘均值’ signifies that the action lies between the two extremes, but is not a quantitative average value, but in the position of the best (最善性), which is consistent with moderation.
‘均值’ is a continuation of the series ‘Ink Lines in Motion (走的墨线)’ from 2013 to 2019. The artist fills the screen with a way of pulling the rope with endless repetitive movements. This work uses ink ropes (墨斗) used by carpenters in China to pull strings full of paint (pigment) and leave lines on paper or canvas cloth to complete the work.
The fruit of GU Xiaoping's abstract experiment the structural screen of the 'overlapping line', is the result of meticulously planned mental labor and the determination of hard physical labor. First, traditional Chinese paper, Xuanzhi (宣紙, Xuan paper) or canvas cloth is fixed, and a thread of ink or paint is drawn from the ink bottle to create a line on the screen. It is repeated from left to right at regular intervals as measured by a ruler, and from right to left without end. That work carries on until the artist is satisfied. Countless vertical horizontal lines drawn by the artist appear in different forms related to the uniquely textured screen.
In the process, cracks in the screen, that is to say not only well drawn lines, but also the texture of the paper and the fabric itself, and the physical properties of the ink or acrylic pigments from the ink line naturally settle down. GU Xiaoping’s display is woven by means of tools, materials and actions visible on the construction site. The lines that are drawn as if tailored becomes the background and creates unique physical properties of the screen and cracks add depth through the unique act of the artist to "pull and fill permanently."
Removing traces of small squares (which you don't know if you don't observe the screen closely) by repeating the act of constantly filling paint in place indefinitely, the screen becomes the sum of a different latticework with different rhymes (韻律). Through the process of monotonous and laborious repetition, his monochromatic screen succeeds in acquiring infinite timeliness and universality. This unique creative technique follows the tradition of literary painting in that it aims to train the mind through a painful, time-consuming repetition of refining and training the mind throughout the process of painting. I would say that the objective of his work is not to show the final outcome, but to show the process of how it is done.
Using the physical properties of the medium, his work stresses the importance of repeating the same process under strict rules, and consequently, he formed a unique space which seemed to penetrate the essence along the cracks in the canvas and paper. The artist replaces this crack with his unique style and depth while achieving the space of healing within the artwork. By doing so, he tries to achieve harmony as if he were to form balance. It reflects the Taoist ethics according to which human beings should pursue their original values by balancing artificial things with the truth of nature, and in this regard, Xuanzhi and canvas, made of natural materials, are suitable mediums to express the simplicity of nature and the formative beauty of purity. It can be said that the artist's faith in 'unity of the ego and the outside world (物我一體)', which is founded on the conviction of becoming one with nature, is indeed passed on to those who appreciate the work.
Kazimir Severinovitch Malevitch and Wassily Kandinsky, who led the abstract movement at the beginning of the 20th century, were from the Soviet Union and Piet Mondrian was from the Netherlands. While the world placed Paris at the center, the great city of the world at the time, all the others were marginal countries. The reality that was presented to them was not satisfactory; it was an obstacle to overcome. The desire for a better world, the desire for utopia, have culminated in abstractions that have erased the face of reality. Russian constructivism artists, like Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin, who followed them, believed that the socialist revolution would be the embodiment of utopia on the ground. Art has forsaken itself in order to build a utopia of reality. However, the dream has been thwarted, and utopia has remained non-existent.
The absence of utopia gives rise to forms which can be considered abstract art, and forms which may be regarded as similar to GU Xiaoping patterns include ‘Pattern & Decoration’ in the 1970s and ‘Neo-Geo’[Art trend in New York City in the 1980s, which is an abbreviation of ‘Neo(新)-Geometric Conceptualism’ as one of the central concepts of simulationism that happened after the mid-1980s. Hal Foster's article on Neo-Geo, or the tendency to be called simulation art, was published in 《Art in America》 (1986, 6) resulted in the rise of Neo Geo seriously.] in the 1980s. These can be regarded as abstract art as it shares the compositional form or method with the preceding abstract form. For example, in Miriam Shapiro’s pattern and decoration artwork, the floral motifs are repeated uniformly and become an element of planetary composition. Peter Halley's work Neo-Geo also follows a long-established form of abstraction known as geometric composition. Nevertheless, they are different from the preceding modern abstract art and uses this distinction as the foundation of existence. Above all, they are distant from the objective of 'inventing a new form' and hence beyond the axis of modern abstract art called 'modernity'. They do not propose a new abstract form, but follow the previous form and choose the direction in which to refer it. Their historical significance is not because they present a new vision, but because they encourage reflection on the previous vision.
If this is the case, Gu Xiaoping adopted the western enformel style as an oriental aesthetics or technique by drawing familiar literary paintings and folk symbols (sign) on Xuanzhi with these tools that have as historicity and modernity based on the Chinese motherlandism(vernacularism, 母国主义), which later extended to canvas cloth. In this regard, he can be evaluated as an artist who consistently explored the spirit and tradition of the East and as an artist who aimed for (established) Chinese Neoplasticism abstract art. In the “House of Utopianism (理想“家”)” exhibition[ 理想“家”(House of Utopianism)：抽象艺术——渴望乌托邦的视觉图像(Abstract art, an iconographic depiction of aspirations for Utopia), 白盒子艺术馆, 北京, 中国(Whitebox Art Center, Beijing, China), 2022.09.23 - 11.26.], I named the contemporary Chinese abstract artists as "China Avantgarde Utopians", as abstract art and utopia are one of the best inventions of the 20th century and are inextricably connected together. GU Xiaoping, the artist of this individual exhibition, is also one of the artists named "China Avantgarde Utopians" who constructed his world with his own technique.
Gu Xiaoping adopted the western enformel style as an oriental aesthetics or technique by drawing familiar literary paintings and folk symbols (sign) on Xuanzhi with these tools that have as historicity and modernity based on the Chinese motherlandism(vernacularism, 母国主义),, which later extended to canvas cloth. In this regard, he can be evaluated as an artist who consistently explored the spirit and tradition of the East and as an artist who aimed for (established) Chinese Neoplasticism abstract art. In the “House of Utopianism (理想“家”)” exhibition, I named the contemporary Chinese abstract artists as "China Avantgarde Utopians", as abstract art and utopia are one of the best inventions of the 20th century and are inextricably connected together. GU Xiaoping, the artist of this individual exhibition, is also one of the artists named "China Avantgarde Utopians" who constructed his world with his own technique.