Points of Departure

Points of Departure
July 20 – September 9, 2017
Hong Kong

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Points of Departure, a group exhibition featuring paintings by Gao Ludi, Lu Song, and Xie Nanxing. These three Chinese artists offer 21st century versions of the appropriation-based processes pioneered by American artists during the 1980s. Points of Departure brings these artists together in order to consider the evolution of painting and its complex relationship with source imagery. The gallery will host an opening reception on July 20, from 6-8 PM at the Pedder Building.

The use of found images and ephemera has radically changed in the decades since postmodernism when artists incorporated found imagery into their work to make commentary on commercial culture. Today, the Internet provides immediate accessibility to trillions of images, offering innumerable options for artists to reference, copy, or alter. More than any other moment in history, artists are using sourced imagery to offer topical commentary and expand the boundaries and language of painting. Points of Departure exemplifies the variety of ways artists have and are using imagery drawn from pop culture and popular media.

Gao Ludi (b. 1990, Zhengzhou, China; lives and works in Beijing) engages with the history of photography and painting as both an aesthetic and physical process. His fluorescent-hued canvases call to mind the proliferation of artificial light in the digital landscape, while his process of superimposing layers of images mimics the mass and speed at which we process information today. Influenced by social media, which has created the phenomena of individuals inserting themselves into the digital sphere through a disciplined regime of capturing and sharing individual movements, Gao attempts to contextualize the ways in which the digital sector has taken on new physical dimensions.

Lu Song (b. 1982, Beijing; lives and works in Beijing) paints from photographs he has taken of the landscape. By layering and repeating the image over and over, the perspective becomes blurred and fluctuates between representation and abstraction. In his landscapes inspired by urban parks and green spaces, Lu Song also inserts imagery drawn from literature, films, and personal experiences to expose the human construction that dominates much of the outdoor spaces we experience. His paintings of leafy foliage exemplify his introspective look at spaces that exist within the border of the natural and manmade environment.

Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, Chongqing, China; lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu, China) produces highly expressive, small-scale oil sketches. He translates the painterly marks from these oil sketches onto large-scale canvases that obscure direct reference to their origins and yet retain a sense of having originated from a specific pre-existing image. This obfuscation of representational meaning underscores the artist’s approach to paintings as an investigation into the supposed objectivity of image making, choosing to focus on the mechanical functions of painting as distortion of reality itself.