Zheng Chongbin: INK as Living Matter

ABRASIVE SURFACE 磨擦的表象, 2018

Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin has held the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. Systematically exploring and deconstructing their conventions and constituents—figure, texture, space, geometry, gesture, materiality—he has developed a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. Central to Zheng’s art is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohered and dissipated. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought, this worldview enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng’s paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order (including organic life and human consciousness) and its inevitable dissipation. His paintings thus resemble natural structures ranging from neurons, blood vessels, and tree branches to mountains, rivers, and coastlines, but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.

Chimeric Landscape 运行中的异化之景, 2015

Environmental video installation 环境影像装置

17'00"

“Using time-lapse and video, I expand the visual notion of ink to explore the life of the material. There is a whole cycle of living duration—of entropy and of regeneration. This concept is the basis of land art as well as light and space art, which share a way of thinking about how our minds engage with nature. Their intent is to bring a sense of order to the seeming natural chaos of nature and [thereby] reveal the living logic of matter.” — 2015

“Zheng’s 16-minute hallucinogenic landscape erotically transforms into an internally projected mind-scape. Fluid forms of optical kinesis, such as those discovered in Northern Sung landscapes transport the optical gaze outside of fiction into a metonym focusing on the origins of life and the aura one finds whilst becoming attuned to them. In Chimeric Landscape, the forms are equally seen, but from the perspective of a promiscuously engaged microscopic journey—one in search of resuscitation, the lost intervals bent on nerve-endings when karma billows into space-time.” —Robert Morgan, 2015