Yin Changzhi | ArtForum review
YIN CHANGZHI | ARTFORUM review
critic：Gao Xu
ARTFORUM Chinese website · 2018.07.25
No simple deduction can describe the "ambiguous" state of his work.
Yin Changzhi’s solo exhibition "Wedges" opened at Gallery 55 on a Saturday afternoon in late June. This name first echoes the form and theme of Yin Changzhi’s painting - "painting" composed of wood and pigment. It also reminds the audience that his works are in the middle between "objects" and "paintings". The artist has a unique way of thinking on the relationship between materials, objects and paintings, which is like an "alien" entering into the sequence from painting to ready-made products.
Yin Changzhi uses abstract forms and ready-made materials in creating his works. The former reminds people of the abstract painting tradition since modern art and the minimalist art developed from it, while the latter is easily associated with the installation art dominated by ready-made products. Therefore, should we classify the works of artists as paintings disguised as "installations", or declare them as installations simulating "painting forms"?
In fact, no simple deduction can describe the "ambiguous" state of his work. On the one hand, the works in the exhibition do not just follow the conventions of two-dimensional painting, but also conform to the general painting habits in the way of viewing. These works are hung on the surface of the wall, very much in line with the conventional way of viewing paintings, inducing the audience to see them as abstract forms of paintings. On the other hand, the artist has repeatedly cut off any claims about the plane of painting in unconventional ways. These works are not about placing paint on the surface of the canvas to form a texture effect, but using combinations of wood, collages and flat painting of color blocks to form a more complex spatial relationship.
Carefully observed, the artist seems to be using the back of the frame to create works, different woods are not deliberately placed on the same plane, but to create different sections of the fracture, each section composed of wood is independent of each other, but at the same time is limited by the outer frame within a unified boundary. The paint on the wood surface is not intended to depict the isolated existence of some kind of image, but to be integrated with the texture of the wood itself. The covering of pigment evokes the texture of wood texture itself, allowing the audience to be fully aware of the rough and concave surface of wood. At the same time, the pigment, which had no exact shape before, also seems to acquire a solid existence.
Yin’s works evoke the collage technique that originated in cubism at the beginning of the last century, when European cubist artists, including Picasso and Braque, began to paste ready-made works directly onto the surface of canvases, an attempt that Greenberg once interpreted as an attempt to move modernist painting toward the plane. In this exhibition, the artist adopts a similar approach not to continue the unfinished work of modernist painting, but to re-explore the new possibilities between painting and objects at a time when ready-made paintings "erode" painting.