Introduction: ShanghART Beijing is honored to announce that Jiang Pengyi’s solo exhibition ‘Monuments of Solitude Given by Desolation’ will open on Sunday, September 22, 2024. This exhibition is the first solo exhibition of an artist after the upgrade of the gallery’s Beijing space. It will focus on presenting Jiang Pengyi’s new masterpieces in the past three years and deeply explore the complex and subtle relationship between individual existence, social reality and natural landscape.
Jiang Pengyi is one of the important artists in the field of contemporary Chinese imagery. His artistic practice has always been committed to breaking through the essence and boundaries of photography. The keen perception and insight of personal life experience and how to face the invisible things in reality run through his creative path of the parallel development of concept and documentary in the past twenty years and are pushed to the extreme in the two latest series of this exhibition.
The exhibition title comes from the new work of the same name ‘Monuments of Solitude Given by Desolation’. The artist skillfully uses chemical reactions to create a series of strange images: humanoid sculptures are placed on the background of the vast and boundless wasteland, like monuments standing in the long river of time, telling the unspeakable loneliness and tenacity deep in the human heart. The separation and recombination of chemical elements, the invisible plunder and occupation. This long process of material transformation not only indicates the fateful and irresistible influence and change of individuals in the general environment of the times, but also symbolizes the re-examination of the symbolic meaning of traditional cultural symbols in the modern context.In an intertextual relationship with this is another new series of works titled ‘Disappearance and Rebirth’. The artist has requisitioned black-and-white film as an ‘experimental field’, conducting various experiments with chemical raw materials since 2022. After two years of micro-reactions, these works, under the exquisite macro shooting technology, reveal an almost cosmic, magnificent scene. Jiang Pengyi articulates his vision, stating, “Presenting tiny things, I regard it as a symbol of the complexity, delicacy, and vastness of the human individual’s heart.” These works transition from solemn and profound sculpture images to the magnificent microcosmic landscape, transcending the realm of photography to become visual contemplations about existence, time, and consciousness itself. Each viewer is invited to find their own reflection within these pieces.
The exhibition is open from September 22nd to October 27th, Tuesday through Sunday, from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
