Participating Artists:Zhang Zhaoying
Exhibition Venue: New Age Gallery（Beijing）
Exhibition Period: 22012.10.13——2012.11.12

New Age Gallery Beijing solemnly presents Guan Yong’s latest solo exhibition – Secondary Form, opening on October 13th, 2012. This is Guan’s first major solo exhibition since 2007, an account of his practice from 2009 onwards, focusing on the artist’s development in narrative structure and visual language. The Word “secondary” embodies the meaning of secondhand, derivation. The Studio Series, borrows the photographs of the studio - a place where art is produced, where these images are the replacement of the scene, a veil obscuring reality; the paintings that derive from the photographs also create a scene of painting; furthermore, images of lower quality have been deliberately selected, or what we could call – the images of images. The word “figuration” implicates representation, molding and metaphor - suitable for describing the blurring between figurativeness and the fictile in Guan’s works. There have been significant changes in Guan’s paintings from 2009. The works manifested clearer characteristics of “visual materiality” together with the fluidity of visual and tactile experiences. From a more complex and ambiguous perspective, he penetrates the core of the painting, discovering the possibility of new ways of painting. This is a significant change in the artist’s narrative structure, rather than his reaffirmation in “painterliness”. The influences that Francis Bacon and images of his studio had on Guan is apparent in his new works, while saluting this visionary master, they also reveals Guan’s current state of mind and the new direction his work is about to take. One must bear in mind that the visually engaging style of painting in these new works is not merely an aesthetic tool, but rather and more importantly, the destruction and interrogation of the linear narrative logic and his emphasis on the materiality of the surface has on the other hand, inspired the immediacy and subjectiveness in the spectator’s viewing experience, where painting is no longer a conceptual vehicle, but has become the conception itself. Spaces, bookshelves and men who read books appear in the paintings as they did before, but the fact that they are not merely symbolic figures but the actual subjects of materiality has been emphasized. The layers of brushstrokes with the accumulating disused paint in the paintings, reveals the origin and home of the works in a reversed narrative. The artist’s elaborate images seem to have faded afar, and the remaining material left behind from the painting process has become the subject of viewing, where the spectator’s perspective focuses and blurs in-between the subject and the remains.