鹿皮胶、火山土、蛤粉、墨、木板、麻布
Nan Ke Gallery is delighted to announce the official opening of artist Meng Zhou's solo exhibition, "Incomplete Wonder · Everlasting Land", on September 16, 2023. This exhibition will be presented in two distinct chapters and spaces. The first chapter, "Incomplete Wonder", will be on display at Nan Ke Gallery from September 16 to October 31, while the second chapter, "Everlasting Land" will be showcased at BACKSTAGE ART space (by appointment only) from September 16 to October 16.
The exhibition is curated by Austrian curator Alexandra Grimmer. She has previously held roles at Ernst Hilger Gallery in Paris (1998-2002) and Lingsheng Art Foundation Beijing (2010-12). She worked as a deputy director of Galerie Lelong Zurich (2006-2009). Since 2022 she is responsible for the program of Blue Mountain Contemporary Art, a collection of Chinese contemporary art with its base in Vienna.
The double-chapter exhibition covers Meng's latest series of sculptures, installations and paintings. The exhibition unfolds gradually like a journey, with light and shadow flowing through the years. The artist uses fragmented materials and myths to create hazy stories, where reality and fantasy seem to unfold in a dream world. Like a cultural archaeology, he collects and arranges stories from different ancient civilisations (e.g. Greece, Egypt, China) as well as from the oral tradition of the indigenous people, and presents them in a way that grows from each other, in order to find a common source of the human past. At the same time, in those missing pieces, the artist fills in fantasy bridges, exotic collections, and a lot of white space, and then gives the stories new connotations and meanings through modern deconstruction and reorganisation.
Meng has been travelling between the UK and China for the past 10 years, exploring the intersection of cross-cultural identities. His work is characterised by the elegance and flavour of the East, but also by the intellectualism and authenticity of the West. The scope of this exhibition encompasses occultism, mythology, palaeontology and dance, with the human being at the centre of the cultural map. In the labyrinth of his mind, or the journey, the destination seems to become blurred, and the process of exploration is more important. The works on display include fossils, meteorites, ores, herbs, creatures, etc., which are rightly or wrongly paired together in an extraordinary journey of the ordinary.
