ZHANG Ruyi: Once Remain, Once Remould : Solo Exhibition

3 November 2023 - 31 January 2024
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Bycatch the Dust 兼捕尘埃, ZHANG Ruyi 张如怡, 2023. Concrete, rebar, steel wire, electric wires 混凝土、钢筋、钢丝绳、电线, Sculpture 雕塑21 × 18 × 50 cm(H) , 2Ed+1Ap
Bycatch the Dust 兼捕尘埃, ZHANG Ruyi 张如怡, 2023. Concrete, rebar, steel wire, electric wires 混凝土、钢筋、钢丝绳、电线, Sculpture 雕塑21 × 18 × 50 cm(H) , 2Ed+1Ap

Artist

ZHANG Ruyi 

 

Duration

2023/11/03 - 2024/01/31

 

Location

Don Gallery, 2555-9 Longteng Avenue, West Bund, Shanghai

 

 

Don Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of ZHANG Ruyi’s solo exhibition "Once Remain, Once Remould", which will run from November 3, 2023 through January 31, 2024. This is the artist's fourth solo exhibition at Don Gallery, following "Consciousness of Location" in 2019. It will feature a series of brand-new sculptures and two dimensional pieces. The title of the exhibition is inspired by ZHANG Ruyi's observations of urban renewal and spatial exhalation. In an era of increasing savagery, the artist continues to examine the detritus that surrounds her, emphasising the undefined forms of contemporary life with creations that lie somewhere between construction and destruction.

 

ZHANG Ruyi discovered the flexibility of urban building materials after creating her iconic concrete sculptures. The work Bycatch the Dust offers an up-and-down view of a hanging object that acts as a limb of the city, a spatial appendage freed from its functional logic. The texture and imagery of the work itself paradoxically evokes the familiar experience of looking at urban greenery. Correspondingly, Dilapidated Gently Sloping, inspired by the common freight iron plate, provides an understated drama to the visual climb. The austere composition of the mosaic cactus reflects, as always, ZHANG Ruyi's fascination with industrial props. ZHANG Ruyi's installation creates traces of uninvolved activity, like a theatre stage. Or, more accurately, a slice of a rising industrial scene. Linking the space in front of and behind the gallery is Planter-7: it takes the form of a niche favoured by the artist, with embedded concrete deities and tilted walls that lead the viewer's eye into a man-made, plastic films rotunda.

 

In the rotunda, ZHANG Ruyi pushes the romance of privacy and the compulsion of publicity to the centre of the stage. Dense plastic films, tapes, fish tanks, mutilated door frames, and constantly looping images: the viewer encounters the "gravel" of modern society in an ever-changing landscape of light and shadow. This circular landscape echoes the uncertainty of aesthetics, as it resembles both a home construction site under renovation and an old abandoned house that retains the remnants of life. In the exhibition, ZHANG Ruyi reflects on life and builds sculptures of it in two procedures. One is fragmentation, and the other is the process of exposing physical objects. For example, in Perishable Modernity-2, the slightly tilted steel bars, broken bricks and inverted chair allude to Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye: a modernist clean façade lined with pierced steel bars.
 

ZHANG Ruyi's work is deeply inspired by the street and beyond, which manifests itself in a love of abandoned objects on the road and a speculation about the sense of belonging of specific renovation consumables. This forms the "family image" of her work, reminding people of the original environment of these remains or remould objects. Her work has always been an analogue of urban metabolism. In essence, this speculation is a dirge, a dirge for the aging city. Extracting Slices-2 offers the viewer of the exhibition an epigraph: in front of and behind the doorframe, inside and outside, left and right, the sheer space surrounding the hidden entity invites one to scrutinise the interpenetration of public and private relations.

 

Rosalind E. Krauss, in the closing chapter of The Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), describes in detail the gist of what the minimalists were all about: '…it staked everything on the accuracy of a meaning…'. She argues that these artists rejected illusionism in sculpture: turning stone into flesh, for example, and sculpture into metaphor. In the coming exhibition, "Once Remain, Once Remould", ZHANG Ruyi attempts a bold synthesis: letting illusion reach its peak in a minimalist arrangement, Matching urban metaphors to appropriate condensation.

 

By XIA Tian

 

 

 

Artist   ZHANG Ruyi

 

ZHANG Ruyi (b.1985) currently lives and works in Shanghai. Her practice and work unfold around the logic of everyday and occupy a unique space which reconciles artefacts, industrial experience, and urban life. The artist draws inspiration from commonplace materials, exploring and mediating the hierarchy and interplay between the individual, the material, and the place as a key narrative pathway. Her work mainly involves site-specific installation, sculpture, and integrated media, using "reality" as a model to draw out the shaping of individual emotions as the city shifts around its inhabitants, and planting intuition and observation in simple materials through the visual language of paradoxical transformation, to bestow a spiritual significance which extends beyond the material.

 

Recent institutional exhibitions include Yuz Museum (Shanghai, 2023), the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art - “Manifesto of Fragility” (Lyon, 2022), He Art Museum (Foshan, Guang Dong, 2022), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022), Power Station of Art (Shanghai, 2021), TANK Shanghai Art Centre (Shanghai, 2021), UCCA Dune (Beijing, 2020), the K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong, 2019), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2018) and other institutions. Her featured solo exhibitions include “Once Remain, Once Remould” (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2023), "ZHANG Ruyi: Speaking Softly" (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2022), "Modern Fossil" (START Museum, Shanghai, 2022), "Consciousness of Location " (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2019), "Bonsai" (François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019).

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