Zheng Chongbin: Unfolding

Altman Siegel is thrilled to present Zheng Chongbin’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Over the past three decades Zheng has developed a unique practice that marries East Asia's tradition of ink painting with multi-media video installations and large-scale public projects. For his first solo exhibition with Altman Siegel Zheng will present a new series of ink on paper paintings and a complex immersive video sculpture. Holding western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension with technology-based work, Zheng’s unique approach to artmaking allows him to systematically explore and deconstruct conventions of nature, texture, space, geometry, gesture, and materiality. This distinctive body of work highlights the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy which exist in continuous entropic loops.

In his paintings, ink pools and stains the long smooth fibers of Xuan paper, creating intersecting planes of tonal abstraction. This featherlight substrate absorbs the pigment from both above and below, creating fully saturated membranes that resemble tectonic plates or ice-age landscapes. The surfaces of these works are sub-divided by intersecting horizontal and vertical lines which tend to conjure a destabilizing sense of cold dislocation. Similarly, in his video work, the viewer is once again disembodied – caught between fused and layered projections on mirror, glass, and semi-transparent scrims. The result is an intoxicating spell that manages to merge the zeitgeist of rapidly advancing technology with solemnity and reverence for the environment.

With a focus on making the unseen, microscopic particles of the natural world visible to the human eye, the imagery in Zheng’s video installations are pulled from CAT scans and MRIs of plant, animal, and mineral matter. The intensity of this unique imaging procedure would be lethal to a human organism. In collaboration with one of Stanford’s leading anatomy professors, Zheng has developed a lab-based approach to filmmaking. The resulting footage is spread upon the sterile surfaces of glass and acrylic, like a specimen spread between slides under a microscope. This installation also marks the artist’s first experiments with sensor-based technologies, which results in the projections being reactive to the viewer – reinforcing the bodily experience of the work. As we approach the imagery recedes and as we back away the imagery swells. This ebb and flow mirrors our complex and fraught relationship to the landscape.