Painting, still the world’s most popular art form, by virtue of its nature，tradition and historical background, inevitably poses a litany of
rhetorical questions:
In the age of new technology, will painting survive?
Is painting practice relevant to anyone beyond the person immersed in the act of painting?
Have the communicative aspects of paint already been fully realized?
What more can painting hope to achieve? Is there anything new we can possibly hope to convey with a painting?
When we talk about painting, we inevitably turn to the dialectic between concept and technique, between attitude and aesthetic,
that results in the act of turning an idea into art. Painting conjures images of the will to express oneself three dimensionally, to pose
questions visually; and, to engage our thoughts on metaphysical questions and the mystery of reality.
In the words of David Sylvester, an optimist when it came to the future of painting:
“The paint appears to act like a miraculous teeming substance that actually generates life under our eyes. It is as if matter and energy
were being continually churned out, were forever being renewed by the paint”.
The artists in this exhibition are primarily engaged in the act of painting, they share the common trait of being “wedded” to painting.
For those less optimistic on painting’s continued evolution, the spectre of Sisyphus may loom over these artists’ peculiar drive to paint.
The works on display have no common style: They present a wide spectrum of brush strokes, paint materials and color palettes,
imbued with diverse meaning, gesture and self-conscious acts. The aim is to offer the audience fertile ground to linger, to look, and
to ponder, for oneself, the “Why?” of painting.
Artists:
Aniwar (b. 1962, Xinjiang Province, China)
Huang Yuxing (b. 1975, Beijing, China)
Huang Zhiyang (b. 1965, Taipei, Taiwan)
Liang Wei (b. 1966, Hubei, China)
Nashunbatu (b. 1969, Inner Mongolia, China)
Sheng Tianhong (b. 1973, Zhejiang Province, China)
Suling Wang (b. Taiwan, Live and works in London)
Xie Qi (b. 1974, Chong Qing, China)

Born in 1969 in Shenyang, China, Wang Xingwei is one of the representatives of Chinese painting after the mid 1990s. His realistic pictorial language adds a new dimension to his paintings after 1994 both in connotation and denotation. The year of 2008 marked the transition in his art, from intervention in the system of signification by means of examination and integration of the pictorial languages as media, to more emphasis on the inherent structure of the pictorial languages and their form, thus highlighting the homogeneity between fundamental factors in a visual reproduction, like form, space, mass, properties, rhythm, order, class, etc., and the psychological structure, unconsciousness and instinct on the part of the painter and the viewers.
 
As a reliable record of the artist’s original idea, as well as a vital stage in the fulfillment of an artwork, a sketch often embodies the keenest and most accurate sense of art, and is sometimes even more vigorous than the final art work, therefore regarded as the formal vehicle of artistic inspirations for an open and liberal artist. More than one hundred in total sketches presented at this exhibition, make up a selection from a large number of sketches that Wang Xingwei has accumulated over the past 20 years. This exhibition, jointly organized by Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-­‐Lucerne and 01100001 Gallery, opening simultaneously with “Wang Xingwei”, a large-scale retrospective exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, will surely offer a unique opportunity to gain a clear and profound understanding as well as genuine admiration of Wang Xingwei’s art works.

In Wang Qiang’s recent paintings, the image materials he uses are not merely copies of coloring representations, but a parallel to his thoughts on paintings. While creating the figures and textures of the realistic world, Wang places himself in a Euclidean space where everyday life generates diverse possibilities. Through confirming the two dimensional inter-relations of the specific features of the world, he refines the daily diversity into a rational visual language – the images of Wang’s paintings approach infinitively to the reproductions of images, yet “elevates” the realistic precision during the process of creation, which clearly defines the boundary between the fields of paintings and images. German philosopher Heidegger and American poet Frost both borrowed the metaphor of “path in the forest” in their work. According to the philosopher, the ones who recognize the path in the forest must be professional forest rangers, while to the poet, the path becomes a life long journey with no way to return. To Wang Qiang, the forest path is where the professionals meet the life journeys, because the ‘precision’ paintings represents is an unreachable that can be perceived.
 
This is Wang Qiang's second solo exhibition at WHITE SPACE BEIJING, showcasing his latest paintings over the past year. Wang Qiang was born in Beijingin 1971. He graduated fromOil Painting Department,ChinaCentral Academy of Fine Arts in 1997; Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2004. Wang now lives and works inBeijing,China.

“Filtrate” consists of two solo exhibitions by Liu Renand Zhang Ruyi who both spontaneously extend their willpower chronologically and, in a rationalized and progressive way, convert the objects of their practice into a porous power unit that filtrates and carries emotionmediafor the discussion and the output of their own individual consciousness.
 
Time and life always remains a motif for Liu Ren. He connects himself with the outside world while processing the material and the source of information. The whole process of his practice is like a transfer station, as the subjective feelings and the objective reality meet and ferment here, present themselves in the form of “a manual microblog”, or imply themselves in a minimalist installation- what is hidden behind the clear and neat visual state is emotional accumulation that can be stripped layer by layer. Born inShanghaiin 1983,Liu Rengraduated in 2007 fromCollegeofFine Arts,ShanghaiUniversity. Currently lives and works in Shanghai.
 
Zhang Ruyi takes control of her expression of emotions in a repetitive and closed way. Her works restore individuals’ state of being in the industrialized social ecology and mechanism, revealing her independent perspective and stand toward the experiential value as an artist, and prompting the individual consciousness under the pressure of the enormous external environment. As her capacity allows, she switches her daily life with the discordance of the urban life, detecting resistance by means of experience and observation, building enclosure in communication, and filtrate all the sentiments imposed by reality in the repetitive and slow practice. Born inShanghaiin 1985, Zhang Ruyi graduated with a Master’s degree fromCollegeofFine Arts,ShanghaiUniversity, in 2012. Currently lives and works in Shanghai.

Gao Ludi will present his latest works at “gū dú”, his first solo exhibition in White SpaceBeijing.
 
It has been Gao Ludi’s primary concern to focus on and explore the pictorial language as medium. Color, images and style often go beyond the set theme. By means of his own body, the artist tries to shape painting as language presentation that roams and evolves in different spaces.
 
As title,“gū dú”, equivalent to “loneliness” in Chinese (孤独), is the motive for his recent paintings that vividly depict his inner world while he is painting and his (his peers’s as well)state of mind while he is in contact with others in his family and society. He surfed the Internet for pictures with the three entry words, i.e.,“孤独”, "gū dú”, and “loneliness”, and depicted them in a selective way, thereby adding a dimension of rule to art as game, as well as revealing the unimaginable difference that words of similar meaning can have in a graphic world. He also employs sticks in his paintings, as well as plenty of lines, so that the traces left by the sticks can generate inexplicable mysticism in the definite and indefinite contrast.
 
Gao Ludi, born in1990 inHenan, graduated from Oil Painting Department,CapitalNormalUniversityin 2012. Currently lives and works in Beijing.

“Filtrate” consists of two solo exhibitions by Liu Renand Zhang Ruyi who both spontaneously extend their willpower chronologically and, in a rationalized and progressive way, convert the objects of their practice into a porous power unit that filtrates and carries emotionmediafor the discussion and the output of their own individual consciousness.
 
Time and life always remains a motif for Liu Ren. He connects himself with the outside world while processing the material and the source of information. The whole process of his practice is like a transfer station, as the subjective feelings and the objective reality meet and ferment here, present themselves in the form of “a manual microblog”, or imply themselves in a minimalist installation－ what is hidden behind the clear and neat visual state is emotional accumulation that can be stripped layer by layer. Born inShanghaiin 1983,Liu Rengraduated in 2007 fromCollegeofFine Arts,ShanghaiUniversity. Currently lives and works in Shanghai.
 
Zhang Ruyi takes control of her expression of emotions in a repetitive and closed way. Her works restore individuals’ state of being in the industrialized social ecology and mechanism, revealing her independent perspective and stand toward the experiential value as an artist, and prompting the individual consciousness under the pressure of the enormous external environment. As her capacity allows, she switches her daily life with the discordance of the urban life, detecting resistance by means of experience and observation, building enclosure in communication, and filtrate all the sentiments imposed by reality in the repetitive and slow practice. Born inShanghaiin 1985, Zhang Ruyi graduated with a Master’s degree fromCollegeofFine Arts,ShanghaiUniversity, in 2012. Currently lives and works in Shanghai.