Liang Yuanwei

One gets the sense in Liang Yuanwei’s solo exhibition “Pomegranate” that she has set out to alter accepted notions of the role of the artist by constantly highlighting the variables and constants of production. Take, for example, Meaning, 2004, four small oil paintings that depict crinkled aluminum foil balls set against different colors that alter one’s perception of the foil. This work seems to encapsulate the hypothesis of the show, postulating that the meaning of an object does not only reside in its physicality—it must also ascribed by context.

Pomegranate, 2011, adopts a similar method. To begin, Liang crinkled a large sheet of paper and then flattened it out and applied various shades of red lipstick to the geometric shapes formed by the sheet’s uneven surface. At the time, the colors looked fresh, but after one year they naturally changed into darker hues. Inspired by this transformation, Liang then asked a designer friend to use the Pantone Color Matching System to process these shades—old and new alike—into 120 samples of paint, which are here applied onto a wall in two long rows. Two sets of two of these colors have been selected by gallery staff and are painted on the walls between Pomegranate, the 120 Pantone colors, and Meaning. These color pairs are an indispensable element of the exhibition, and the grand scale on which they are rendered alludes to Mark Rothko’s transcendent fields of pigment, an inspiration that Liang may have appropriated in her creation of visual space in her paintings.

On the one hand, this show seems to be a reminder of Liang’s basic interest in perception. Yet, on the other hand, the artificiality of these standardized colors also highlights agency and collaboration, which was previously absent in her practice. Meanwhile, the core of Liang’s practice remains constant, like time.