Simplicity

Singapore—Pearl Lam Galleries is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of works by Chinese artist Zhu Jinshi in Singapore. Zhu Jinshi’s wide-ranging and diverse oeuvre across media as varied as installation, objects, performance, video, photography and painting over the past 30 years is telling of an artist with an ongoing commitment to broadening and advancing his means of expression.

One of the renowned group of artists who left China in the 1980s, Zhu was marked by his move to Germany and his encounters with the work of artists including Beuys, and the Arte Povera and Fluxus movements, among others. Abandoning painting for a short time, he began to engage in more radical forms of expression, producing conceptual, installation and performance work and exploring possibilities for extending art into physical space. Zhu’s practice was characterised by its use of contemporary Western art theory to uncover new possibilities in the cultural resources and materials of China. It is a mark of his quality as an artist that he continues to forge a fresh and profoundly distinctive idiom out of his two ‘homes’.

The framework of the exhibition provides the opportunity to see works from two of the most iconic categories of Zhu Jinshi’s oeuvre, installation and painting, in conversation. Work, an arresting site-specific Xuan paper installation conceived by the artist for the gallery space, stretches over 30 metres and is created from 8,000 sheets of rice paper, a medium which Zhu has returned to throughout his career and which he reinvents through monumental installations, individually crumpled and rolled by hand and partially dipped in black ink.