Art Basel Hong Kong 2018

Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, 27 - 31 March 2018 
Booth 1C36

What would it look like if the contemporary world is delineated in the form of landscape painting? Different people have different answers for that. If we put a deeper thought into that, we’d realize the contemporary world includes not only man-made landscape, natural landscape but also the virtual internet world. In other words, it includes not only the seeable (i.e. landscape in front of our eyes) but also the perceivable (i.e. information of the cosmos). When the latter is received by our mind, it also constitutes a prominent part of the contemporary world. Moreover, as the starting point of the timeline of all time, the contemporary world, naturally, contains the earlier history – the past as well as the physical evidence of the past constitute another dimension of the contemporary world. More importantly, the delineation hereby created pertains only to the one who creates it as it is the reflection of one’s inner world and life experience: the image of the world varies person by person.

 

What Bi Rongrong endeavors to do is to create a landscape painting of the contemporary world. As the process is long and complex, this “painting” keeps evolving, slowly and yet constantly. A good mastery of ink painting skills enables her to gain a profound insight into landscape painting, which in return makes her work an ever-developing landscape of the contemporary time. Rather than completing everything all at once, she treats the “painting” like a living object that grows organically and continuously. To be more specific, she collects many visual fragments she encounters during daily life or journeys. These fragments include street graffiti, Babylonian architectural patterns, tree silhouettes passing by train windows, and posters in different European cities. In Bi Rongrong’s work, these source materials are presented in a somewhat decorative and abstract way. To the viewers, it is unfamiliar as it is highly personal. But in the meantime, as the visual sources are rooted in people’s common visual experience, deep in the viewers’ mind a sense of empathy will be aroused. Her work ranges from painting, video to installation and textile; and different media give out different senses of visual experiences. Fiction Landscape is a project with vitality. It is subtle and yet specific. With a root in the artist’s personal experience, it manages to evoke viewers’ perception of the nature and the landscape.