World-renowned artist Zhang Huan has opened his largest solo exhibition in China, ‘Q Confucius’ at The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), explores the impact on art, society, and religion of China’s rapid economic, cultural, and environmental changes. The collection of entirely new work, commissioned specifically for RAM’s exhibition featuring animated large-scale sculptures, ash paintings and installations. Zhang Huan: Q Confucius, is guest curated by Fumio Nanjo, Director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and will be on view until January 29.
The basic concepts of the Q Confucius exhibition have their origins in themes that have long been of concern for artist Zhang Huan’s creative practise: the relationships that humankind, both as individuals and collectives, have with their natural, social and cultural environment, both in our lives and in the broader course of human development; and also the poetic expression of the fundamental nature of these relationships. The origins of Zhang’s creative practise on these themes can be traced back to the series of performance pieces he made in the 1990s, the origins are also apparent in what he calls his ‘concept photo’ works and have extended onwards into his later works using material media.
In recent years, through working with materials, craft techniques and symbols that have particular cultural meanings, such as incense ash, cowhide, woodcut and historical photographs, the artist has ever more clearly targeted his critique on the direction taken by modern social development, questioning the meaning of material abundance and technological progress for human existence. This is both the logical extension of Zhang Huan’s sustained interest in motifs of human nature and also the artist’s contemplation of and response to the ever more frequent natural disasters and clashes of cultures seen around the world in recent years.
Q Confucius is the latest development along this creative trajectory. The exhibition makes use of ‘Confucius’, a symbol representative of Eastern moral and political thinking, to explore the question of how humanity might, in an era of technological development and rapidly evolving social organisations and means of interaction, progress together and come to coexist in harmony, both with fellow humans and with Nature, and indeed whether this is possible at all.
