展期 Period：
2023.12.1—2023.12.30
艺术家 Artist：
策展人 Curator：
地点 Venue：
索卡艺术 Soka Art（北京）
新闻稿 Press Release：
索卡艺术荣幸宣布：王小双《生命礼赞》以及张银亮《螺旋航行》展览将于2023年12月1日正式开幕，展览特邀宁文策展，首次呈现了两位艺术家创作于2023年的二十余件新作。
似曾相识，却又素昧平生——这是对张银亮绘画的第一感觉，那种图像带来的不确定性，让她的作品“不能被立刻认出”。
虽然张银亮绘画的图像大多源自艺术家现实生活中的真实场景，但画面看上去却有一种超越现实的陌生之感，一种与当下的疏离之感。张银亮好像一个勇敢行走在世界之外的“局外人”，同时她也是一位观察者，冷静地观察着我们的生活和世界。
在张银亮的作品之中，看似日常的景观，却是被抽离了生活气息的异度时空。如梦境般的熟悉且陌生感使得观者始终保持着他者的角度去俯瞰凝视画面中艺术家构建的不同文化的生活地景，即是真实的，亦是虚幻的。
从中学时代开始，张银亮就对自然、人和建筑的关系产生了浓厚的兴趣；在伦敦斯莱德美术学院上研究生时她已确定把这三者作为绘画的主题。看上去，张银亮好像在画人与城市，但更准确的说，其实张银亮一直感兴趣的、一直在描绘的主题始终都是公共空间——安置了人、建筑与植物的当下地景。
《螺旋航行》展出的九张新作全部创作于2023年，呈现了张银亮从绘画角度出发正在探讨的几个问题：首先是对色彩的调度。新作中，大量出现了强对比色、互补色的运用——尤其是中国传统美学中一些常见的配色方式：比如红与绿、黄与紫等——选择这种配色方式无疑是危险的，一旦运用不好就会落入俗套，而张银亮在画面中保持了微妙的平衡。第二是在空间的处理上，作品中出现了一种奇异的时空交错之感。艺术家没有遵循传统透视法：她把不同的建筑变形、共置于同一画面；最重要的是，画面中的人亦表达了艺术家对空间的理解：“人本身也有正向空间和负向空间”。基于此，张银亮作品中的人物都是虚实相间的，你也许会恍惚，看到的是人本身、还是人的影子？甚至有时人几乎抽象为块状的几何形状。
张银亮的绘画去除了叙事性。她的创作主题散落在每张画中，好像一个伞状结构；所以她的画，需要并置起来呈现与观看。如果用电影来比喻，张银亮的绘画在传递艺术家对多样化生存形态的感知。每件作品都好像电影中的一个场景、一个片段，都是局部；而只有将她所有作品组合在一起，才能看到这部电影。
“生命不是循环而是螺旋”，美国作家凯伦·汤普森·沃克 (Karen Thompson Walker) 在她的科幻小说《奇迹时代》（The Age Of Miracles）中分享到,”曾经向你呈现的每一堂人生课程都会再次出现，直到你学会为止。”
“螺旋”（Sprial），在美学、哲学、文学、生物科学等不同角度都有不同的阐释。选择《螺旋航行》作为张银亮本次个展的主题，灵感源自艺术家的创作与生活轨迹。张银亮从小就在多种不同文化中成长与穿行：泉州出生、香港长大、去英国读大学、回国后居住在北京。她像一个安静的旅行者，飞翔于不同的地域与文化之中，汲取营养、观察世界。如果说，人生是一场大航海、人生是一个不断螺旋上升的旅程——就像我们每个人细胞中的DNA——呈现的也是双螺旋结构；那么对于张银亮来说，对于一位画家来说，“对绘画语言本身的探讨”是张银亮创作的核心。以此为始发点，无论她在绘画主题、内容、形式上如何变化，无论航行到哪里，始终都是围绕这个核心在螺旋上升。
个展《螺旋航行》，一方面呈现了张银亮在绘画中思考、关心的一些问题，例如“图像中有意义的形式是哪些？画面成立的准则在哪里？”，一方面也呈现出张银亮在艺术创作上与之前不同的探索，“到最后我画的不是对象的具象，到最后其实画的是感知和关联”。在《螺旋航行》中，我们可以看到艺术家在绘画语言上的新的探索；也可以看到，艺术家对于人在自然环境中生存到人在人造环境中生存的转变的观察，艺术家对人类作为生物体到作为文化体的演进的探究。
Soka Art is pleased to announce the exhibitions of Wang Xiaoshuang's "Rhapsody of Life" and Anna Nganleong Cheung's "Spiral Voyage" will be held on December 1, 2023 at Soka Art Beijing. The exhibitions, curated by Ning Wen, presented more than twenty new artworks created by both artists in the year 2023.
Déjà vu, yet unfamiliar is the initial feeling of Anna Nganleong Cheung's paintings, the ambiguity brought by the images makes her work "not immediately recognizable". Although most of the images in Cheung's paintings originate from real scenes in the artist's life, the images seem to have a sense of strangeness that transcends reality and a sense of alienation from the present. Cheung seems to be an "outsider" who bravely walks outside the world, meanwhile, she is also an observer who calmly observes our life and the world.
In Cheung's works, the seemingly commonplace landscapes are actually alien time and space that has been separated from the flavor of life. The dream-like sense of familiarity and strangeness allows the viewer to always maintain the perspective of others, overlooking and gazing at the living landscape of different cultures constructed by the artist in the image, which is both real and illusory.
Since her middle school days, Cheung has been deeply interested in the relationship between nature, individuals and architecture; When she was a postgraduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she had already identified these three as the themes of her paintings. It may seem that Cheung is painting individuals and cities, but more accurately, the theme that Cheung has always been interested in and depicted is public space - a contemporary scene where people, buildings and plants are placed.
The nine new works on display in "Spiral Voyage", all created in 2023, present several issues that Cheung is exploring from the perspective of painting: the first is the scheduling of colors. In the new works, there is a great deal of use of strong contrasting and complementary colors - especially some common color schemes in traditional Chinese aesthetics, such as red and green, yellow and purple, etc. The choice of such color schemes is undoubtedly a dangerous one, and once it is used not well it will fall into the cliche, whereas Cheung maintains a delicate balance in her images. Secondly, in dealing with space, there is a strange sense of time and space interlacing in the work. The artist does not follow the traditional perspective method: she transforms and juxtaposes different buildings and places in the same image; most importantly, the people in the picture also expresses the artist's understanding of space: "People themselves also have positive space and negative space". Based on this, the figures in Cheung's works are alternately fictional and real, and you may be confused what you see is the person himself or the shadow of the person. There are even times when people are even abstracted into blocky geometric shapes.
Cheung's paintings remove narrative. Her creative themes are scattered throughout each painting, like an umbrella structure; therefore, her paintings need to be presented and viewed in juxtaposition. If we use movies as a metaphor, Cheung's paintings conveys the artist's perception of diverse forms of existence. Each work is like a scene, a fragment, a part of a movie, and the movie can only be seen when all her works are put together.
"Life is not a cycle but a spiral. " American author Karen Thompson Walker stated in her science fiction novel The Age Of Miracles, "Every life lesson that has ever been presented to you will come back again, until you learn it. "
"Spiral" has different interpretations from different perspectives such as aesthetics, philosophy, literature and biological science. The choice of "Spiral Voyage" as the theme of Cheung's solo exhibition is inspired by the her artistic creation and life trajectory. Cheung has grown up and traveled through many different cultures since she was a child: she was born in Quanzhou, grew up in Hong Kong, studied at the universities in the UK, lived and worked in Beijing after returning to China. Like a quiet traveler, she soars through different regions and cultures, absorbing nourishment and observing the world. If life is a great voyage, a journey of continuous spiral - just like the DNA in each of our cells - presenting a double-helix structure; then for Cheung, for a painter, "the exploration of painting itself" is the core of Cheung's creation. Taking this as the starting point, no matter how she changes the theme, content and form of her paintings, no matter where she sails to, she always spirals upward around this core.
The solo exhibition "Spiral Voyage", on the one hand, it presents some issues that Cheung has been thinking and caring about in her recent paintings, such as "What are the meaningful forms in the image? What are the criteria for establishing a picture?" On the other hand, it also presents Cheung's different explorations in artistic creation from the previous ones: "In the end, what I paint is not the representation of the object, but the perception and connection". In "Spiral Voyage", we can see the artist’s new exploration in the language of painting, we also can see the artist's observation of the transition from human survival in a natural environment to human survival in the artificial environment, and the artist's exploration of the evolution of human beings as biological entities and as cultural entities.
