Shun Art Gallery is honored to present artist Tingwei Liang’s solo exhibition Party Before New Year Party. The exhibition showcases the artist’s new works from 2022, including more than 20 works from the two series “GODISH” and “MIMICS”. Among them, the “GODISH” series differs from the previous works, adding new symbols. Through the re-creation of religious works at the beginning of the Renaissance, human beings are divided into divine and animal, that is, the monkey with a strong religious color in the work. This way of expression subtly allows the audience into the so-called perspective of God, looking back at human society itself in a higher dimension, and thinking about the significance of religion, an indispensable part of civilization, in human history that differs from the previous. The “MIMICS” series is derived from the Latin language and has the meaning of “imitation” in English, which means “monkeys imitate human behavior”. The almost identical sense of sight of monkeys expresses the epitome of human society from an absolute perspective.
Tingwei Liang chose monkeys as the core symbol for his works. In the stage of the “Mankey” series, the pictures are strong and point directly to people’s hearts. Under the gaze of the monkey group, the viewers subconsciously see themselves. This kind of gaze is uncomfortable， just like the gaze of the naked woman in Manet’s “Dinner on the Grass”, it is like a mirror, forcing you to see your embarrassment. The logic of the artists in the “Godish” series inherits the previous one. The GODISH series was born during the first epidemic in Shanghai in 2019 after Tingwei Liang returned from Central Saint Martins. The artist did not want to use the appearance of the epidemic to describe the present but chose to use ancient and imitation methods to pay tribute to the Black Death period of human beings more than 600 years ago, and reflect on the current similarities and differences by recalling the history of that period.
The real life in northern Italy from the 13th to the 14th century was a dark age. The church was licentious, the city-states incessantly attack each other, and the Black Death swallow the city. Human beings can no longer safely hand over their souls to God, and instead, look within themselves for the antidote. City-states need talented people to defend and establish prestige, individuals need to rely on their abilities to survive, and businessmen must maximize their personal interests. Therefore, the value of people themselves begins to increase, humanism wakes up, and the time for the Renaissance arrives. In contrast to the current situation of human beings, when the pandemic and war affect everyone’s life, when isolation and confrontation tear our intimate relationship apart, the civilization building built by human beings for hundreds of years seems to have lost the foundation of faith. We saw our arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, numbness, and prejudice…but we couldn’t change anything about it. If the internal logic of the last Renaissance lies in the collapse and reconstruction of beliefs, is it possible for us now to re-establish a “new Renaissance” that unites people’s hearts in a time that beliefs are absent?
Tingwei Liang’s way of seeing, on the one hand, is the interaction between the work and the audience, on the other hand, is to stand in the past and objectively look forward to the future world. Therefore, in the GODISH series, Liang expands new perspectives and dimensions in the visual collision between advanced civilization and primitive races. At the same time, through the ingenious re-creation of the works in the alternate period of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it not only metaphors the present, but also buries the optimistic expectation for the “New Renaissance”.
