Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: Moscow Government – Government of Moscow –
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Exposition "Spring follows autumn" The exhibition of contemporary Chinese artist Zhou Yiwen was located in six halls of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) on Gogolevsky Boulevard. It presented graphics, painting, sculpture, video and installations by an artist unfamiliar to the Moscow public.
Dove of Peace
The works of Zhou Yiwen, executed in such a diverse manner, at the Moscow exhibition, as in the artist's many years of work, are united by the image of a white dove, which in almost all cultures denotes love, peace, spirituality and mediation between different levels of the universe. The image does not require transcoding and is an attempt to realize the artist's dream of uniting the cultures of the East and West in his own universe.
Zhou Yiwen talks about himself as an illustrator of children's books and a storyteller. Like the symbolism of the white dove, this fact cannot fail to captivate viewers around the world. Russian art lovers, brought up on the works of Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vasiliev, Erik Bulatov, Viktor Pivovarov and other artists, expect especially much from illustrators.
Mascara in clean water and more
As an artist who exhibits and sells his work, Zhou Yiwen began with fairly traditional Chinese landscapes in ink on paper. In a video presented on one of the screens, which the attentive viewer should linger over, the master poetically proclaims the paramount importance of ink in both his work and his very existence as an artist.
Without abandoning the use of ink and paper, Zhou Yiwen experiments and diversifies his techniques. In some cases, he uses acrylic paint dripping to form an intricate web-like veil over graphic or pictorial images, in others, he makes hand prints or applies applique to an ink-covered surface.
Just as he layers borrowed techniques on a Chinese shaded base, Zhou Yiwen introduces into the minimalist two-color plane of Far Eastern graphics pictorial and sculptural, ready-made and reworked images of the best Renaissance and later works of European art. Here, next to each other, is a feather, the image of which Chinese artists have been honing for three thousand years, and the head of Michelangelo's David or da Vinci's Mona Lisa, to which European culture has long aspired. In the semantic center is a dove, sometimes depicted carefully, sometimes simplified, and sometimes only a feather that has fallen from the sky is shown.
In other rooms, a painted Taoist sculpture and a cartoon cat are added, and much more could be added. All of these are just ready-made bricks, indistinguishable from a brushstroke or a line, from which the building of the art that Zhou Yiwen is engaged in is constructed. However, one of the most important questions for him remains how to escape from the influence of the West and return to his own creative identity.
"The project is called "Spring after Autumn" because the artist's entire figurative world, which is presented at the exhibition, testifies to the fact that after any possible time of complexity, sadness, contradictions, there always comes a time of renewal. It can also be seen that the artist himself is very keen on the idea of appropriating images of the European Renaissance. We can recall that the Renaissance was called the "spring of art". The artist himself puts this phenomenon at the forefront, calls it the light of enlightenment, which can enlighten any culture and reconcile any contradictions," explains the curator of the exhibition, Katerina Zaitseva.
East to West, West to East
The Moscow exhibition, which focuses on more intimate works, does not include the artist’s large-scale works that took part in his world tour, which began in China and continued in Florence and Venice last year. These include, for example, a spectacular installation with many pigeons sitting and taking off in one space, where the viewer feels as if he is in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, or an object in the form of a wounded green horse without a rider, walking, surrounded by Zhou Yiwen’s iconic feathers (and, of course, with a pigeon in the center of the composition). “East to West, West to East” is how the artist called his exhibition tour, which, according to him, is designed to erase boundaries and fill the voids between cultural worlds. An idea of these delightfully spectacular and important works for the master can be formed from the video documentation in one of the museum’s halls and a miniature green horse sitting in a silver chair.
The green horse seems to demand a Russian context and appears at the exhibition, but not next to, say, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, but surrounded by works of art carefully selected from the MMOMA collection by curators Katerina Zaitseva and Igor Kostrikov. These are the graphic series “Elusiveness” by Rostan Tavasiev and “Case of Sensations” by Igor Makarevich. Rostan’s green bear looks at the horse from the wall opposite, surrounded by others like him — and there is also a green torso in a box. Thus, Shenzhen, Zhou Yiwen’s native city, and Moscow, East and West met in the halls of the Moscow museum.
You can purchase tickets to the exhibition using the service "Mosbilet".
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