Rifts in Silence

Ding Wu Lian Zhang Zhao Qian

May 26, 2018 ~ Jun 25

M Art Center is honored to announce Rifts in Silence, the group exhibition of WU Ding, ZHANG Lian and ZHAO Qian, presenting various forms of art pieces including installations, videos and paintings, etc. The exhibition will be opened on May 26th, 2018 and remain on view through June 25th. The three artists encounter in this exhibition and together respond to the subject of time from their individual backgrounds and contexts, giving an insight into the overlooked rifts in the silent system of time.

INTRO

The reason why the past can extend to the present is because of the future of certain objects.
WU Ding
Neither can we control twisted time nor the direction and speed of flow.
ZHANG Lian
I came back to the same place time after time to encounter what I saw before.
ZHAO Qian

——WU Ding
In WU Ding’s video work, The Reason Why the Past can Extend to the Present is Because of the Future of Certain Objects, an illuminated object lied on the beach is being flooded by tides. In people’s traditional notion, time is regarded as a linear and evenly forward flow which is constructed by the past, the present and the future. Differently in WU Ding’s theory, the future and the past juxtapose with the present so that the past never passes and the future always comes around. The artist has made diverse experiments on this theory in his works. God Never Roll the Dice Because the Rolling is Doomed to Stay away from the Chance is a looping video of which the beginning and end is connected seamlessly. The artist puts the motions of a ring before and after being thrown up, a static line and its moving heliciform status in a same picture. Meanwhile, the characteristic long name also seems to remind us the time we spend on watching and understanding these words.

——ZHANG Lian
In the early period, ZHANG Lian used to construct multiple storytelling through the method of collage and montage upon her collection of images taken in various time and locations, making up a disordered universe which stays away from the reality. Along with developing on art practice such as the series of Tea Room, Golf Club and Jupiter, ZHANG Lian starts to represent some physical objects from the perspective of time in which the spatial time is represented as mobile and multidimensional. In Golf Club, time is endowed with its own rhythm and texture in the context of literature. Room3 which is her new completion in this exhibition is inspired from the impression of a Korean ancient crooked porcelain called Moon Jar. The video ends at the image which looks totally different from the original one after rearrangement of memory and fermentation of time.

——ZHAO Qian
“It takes 10 hours and 50 minutes from San Francisco to Shanghai by air. And the time difference between the two cities is 15 hours.” The feeling of shifting and interlacing brought with time difference composes ZHAO Qian’s context of his artworks. As a witness with distance, the artist takes the image, the memory, the reality and the virtual away from the time shaft and reunites them. At this stage, the meaningless meeting of these factors makes up an experiential moment and a repeatable moment as well. During the making of We Went through the City to Move a Car, the artist tried various compositions of images, notes, objects and photos over and over again, coming back to the original point in post-production.

Human beings keep asking timeless question upon time. How did time exist? Does time come to an end? How do we perceive time? Does it operate interior or exterior itself? Is it linear or circular? Time can be regarded as numbers on a mobile phone and the three pointers on a clock, and can also be interpreted to the conception of Duration by Henri Bergson and Being-towards-death by Martin Heidegger. Immanuel Kant who put forward the theory of Antinomies once said that the essence of things is deeply hidden. Similarly, through questioning and pushing towards the hidden concept of time, the three artists enter the matrix of this subject from different perspective and provide diverse suggestions to experience time. The exhibition makes it possible to dive into the overlooked rifts in the overwhelming silence of time from a more original and expansive scale.