FOG Design+Art 2024: Booth 105

Altman Siegel is delighted to announce a focused presentation of new works by Zheng Chongbin alongside a suite of paintings by Laeh Glenn for FOG Design+Art 2024. The booth will feature furniture design in collaboration with AubreyMaxwell.

A Bay Area resident for three decades, Zheng Chongbin has become internationally acclaimed for his paintings and installations. One of the most influential experimental ink painters of the 1980s, Zheng is widely recognized for his work exploring and deconstructing the conventions and constituents of classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction. Formally trained in Chinese painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zheng finds inspiration in the natural light and landscape of Northern California, where he earned his Masters Degree from San Francisco Art Institute. Central to his practice is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohere and dissipate. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought, this worldview enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng's paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order and its inevitable dissipation. His paintings thus resemble natural structures ranging from neurons, blood vessels, and tree branches to mountains, rivers, and coastlines, but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.

In a suite of new paintings, Laeh Glenn approaches the traditional genre of the still life from a distinctly contemporary perspective. A student of image making, Glenn tracks the evolution of visual culture and its dissemination through digital technology. Often drawing her source material from images found online, these new paintings refer to vector images: computer graphics designed to be dropped into virtual environments for gaming or advertising purposes. Encountering the images online, they exist in a featureless void defined only by a horizon line. Glenn pulls these objects out of their digital purgatory, lovingly rendering a painted interior space for them to inhabit.

The still life has traditionally depicted personal possessions and commonplace objects, offering viewers a window into daily life during the period they were created. Introducing the vector images as her source material situates the paintings in our current digitally inflected moment. A vase of flowers can evoke the evanescence of life or the beauty and fragility of nature. Through these new works, Glenn adapts the genre to reflect isolation of our contemporary experience and the anxiety that permeates our relationship to ever advancing technology.

Zheng Chongbin's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Ryosoku-in Temple Kennin-ji, Kyoto; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa; and Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai. Recent group exhibitions include Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Zhejiang Museum of Art, Hangzhou; and Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto.

 

Laeh Glenn's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Vanity Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA and Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Friends Indeed, San Francisco, CA; Ratio 3, Los Angeles, CA; Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Cressman Center for Visual Arts, Louisville, KY; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, CA; Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden; PIASA, Paris, France; Room East, New York, NY; Grice Bench, New York, NY; Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY; Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

The furniture setting conceived by AubreyMaxwell for Altman Siegel is designed by San Francisco based interiors and furniture designer Jiun Ho. The goal was to create a harmonious furniture setting, floated away from the walls, that would complement but not detract from the powerful installation of Zheng Chongbin's art. The clean lines, organic forms and textural materials of Jiun Ho's furnishings allowed for a substantial and inviting setting in this gallery booth. Regards to Jiun Ho and the De Sousa Hughes showroom in San Francisco for loaning these pieces.

 

AubreyMaxwell is an Interior Design and Art Advisory partnership between Robbie McMillan and Marcus Keller. Their design philosophy is a harmonious blend of intimacy and awe-inspiration. They achieve this balance through a meticulous focus on space planning, fine craftsmanship, and the curation of exquisite furnishings, all while keeping a steadfast eye on the central role of art in their projects. AubreyMaxwell is based in San Francisco with projects across the US.