News | ZHANG Ruyi's participation in the 16th Biennale de Lyon

Lyon, France

 

Don Gallery is delighted to announce the participation of our artist ZHANG Ruyi with her latest project Renovation: Vacant Lot at the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, which is running from 14 September to 31 December 2022. Ruyi’s project is showing at The Guimet Museum and The Religious Art Museum of Fouviere in Lyon.

 

This year’s Biennale is curated by the curatorial duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. Under the theme Manifesto of Fragility, fragility is placed at the heart of a generative form of resistance. The common awareness of the shared precariousness reinforces the assertion that 'our fragility is perhaps one of few universally felt truths in our divided world'. More crucially, if this fragility is inevitable, how can artists harness it as a foundation for empowerment while also addressing the here and now and planning for the future?

 

“It alludes to the concealed mystery of vulnerability and individual dispersion, which evolves, ferments, and filters in the conflicting reality of existence, giving birth to a voice and an attitude”, according to ZHANG Ruyi, who deftly catches the tension beneath the subject matter. Incorporating her experience of confinement during Shanghai's lockdown and isolation into this site-specific installation and practice, the artist continues to explore the hierarchical interactions between individuals, materials and place. Additionally, she makes use of the unique historical context of the once-thriving and now-defunct Guimet Museum, allowing the works to interact as if they were visitors and creating a dialogue between fragility and resistance.

 

The bright and orderly tiled surfaces, sizable wood panels and tinfoil, and the bare and rough white walls are set against cool fluorescent lights as we enter ZHANG's space from the vast and dark Grand Hall of the Guimet Museum, revealing a distinctly industrial and orderly feel from the outside environment. The sounds of electric drills and pounding from the installation Domestic Wasteland (2020), a heavy but invisible intervention in the space that the artist gathered from the city's construction and demolition sites, awakens us even before we can recognise the surroundings.

 
It is difficult to help but think of a web of order that opens up to everyone in a state of emergency when large areas of family-use tinfoil are repeatedly folded and unfolded, leaving a dense grid-like trail that extends into a spatial and era backdrop. For the artist, tinfoil is a metallic material that is both fragile and heat-resistant, and also refers to the meals and conversations that take place in the daily life of the family. In this context, the metaphor of tinfoil and the slightly harsh urban sounds form a dramatic contrast and interaction between inside and outside, between home and surroundings, laying bare the fragility beneath the calmness.

 

The Waste (2020), a floor-mounted work, has also been given a fresh interpretation in this project. The tinfoil is softly suspended from the rebar of building rubble that has fallen during the modern demolition process, the lines of which gently conceal the coarseness of the past. The image on the tinfoil is a transfer of a cluster of cacti growing in a barren setting, confused with rocks in the hot sun, and again reflected in the base and surroundings beneath the tinfoil, as if collaging a series of imaginary fragments triggered by temperature, surroundings, interior space, etc. This artificial "modern fossil" also alludes to a shifting power dynamic enmeshed in architecture (the form of the era) and garbage (the leftovers), lending "The Waste" the connotation of a "discarded landscape."

 

ZHANG Ruyi's fascination with contradictory materials and relationships is also evident in Planter-7 (2022). A piece of rubble was planted with cactus spines painted in brownish nail polish, resembling dead grass growing on the collapse of a giant building. The natural and the artificial elements are harmoniously blended together here - the rusting of the steel fragment is the consequence of natural growth, the cactus spines were taken from real nature, while the nail varnish is an industrial product for human grooming – as if the sharpness of the spines is extremely close to the touch of the fingertips. The whole piece is embedded in the niche at just the right size, also in the context of Guimet’s former role as a historical museum.

 

Next, through the ready-made door piece of Sleepwalking in Space (2021-2022), we enter the 'interior' where the space is reduced in height. Two video works, created ten years apart, reflect a change in the artist's creative intentions and approach. In the early work Tool (2012), the artist uses a handheld DV to record the process of the high heels stepping in place and breaking the mirror till it reflects the gradual shattering of the surrounding skyscrapers and buildings. Back then, the artist focused more on the expression of her personal emotions, and the shots eventually shake and blur into a greyish shard.

 

On the contrary, Folded Sorrow (2021-2022) is a collage of fragments that ZHANG usually observes and collects up close: a static piece of copper, a slowly rotating fan, a spider's web floating on the spikes of a cactus, and occasionally encounters with busy construction sites... In the sequence of images, stillness and flow are confronted, and the forms of nature and individual labour are interwoven and mingled. In comparison, Folded Sorrow is more inwardly self-repressed than the Domestic Wasteland and Tool, which are extroverted and violent expressions. Particularly in this natural creation-like weaving, the cobwebs that float in the air between the spikes indicate a delicate balance and cohabitation of fragility and strength. In contrast to the video's stunning pictures of excavators, it breeds way too many thoughts that can only be folded up and kept momentarily in pockets since they have nowhere to start and nowhere to proceed.

 

It is difficult to miss the fact that the site was thoroughly renovated with tiles and wood panels, both of which are typical construction materials in most Asian cities. They are frequently utilised in both private families and public settings, including car washes and large landfills, because of their practicality, affordability, and ease of cleaning. The tiled and panel setting has many allusions and allegories, but for ZHANG, it is more about the tension between individuals and the varied context of real life. Particularly noteworthy is the last room, whose glossy tiles encircle the walls and immediately suggest the unfolding of a more intimate space. Here, the contradictory transformations in materials and the dispatching of spatial layers are fully present. 
 
In the work Speak Softly-3 (2022), the artist experimented for the first time with the presentation of a large interspersed thorny film that naturally adheres to the tiled wall. Plastic film, a common dustproofing material used in renovation, is both cheap and transparent. The spines, collected from different species of cactus plants, extend through the room as a more personal and body-related imagery, "stitched" onto the film like a light rain, and are also locked tightly onto the smooth tiled surface. Its tenderness that formerly bloomed on the rubble is delicately replaced with the sharpness that pierces penetrating through the film here. Looking to the left, the floor drain, misplaced in the centre of the wall, is another interpretation and imagining of the spines, dissolving into a self-digestion in the face of the oppression and confusion of the surrounding reality.

 

The perpetual cycle of "construction" and "demolition" and the rapidly evolving urban landscape can be considered to be replete with fragility and resistance. The interaction and confrontation between the individual and reality become a constant proposition that haunts everyone. Reverting to the exhibition's theme, Renovation: Vacant Lot, in ZHANG Ruyi's interpretation, the piles of debris and the void represent two sides of the same coin. A vacant lot can refer to both the psychological space and the physical space of urban life. There are always vacant areas in the city's weekly "renovation" that are left unfilled, that are awaiting transformation, that are absent in the heart, showing their own fragile power. Just as the Biennale's Manifesto states, "true power moves not to conquer new frontiers but rather to continue on a march towards a home that is carried within".

 

 

 

9 October 2022
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