Bangkok Holiday

HAO ZECHENG & WAN PENG DUAL EXHIBITION

Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok

August 17 – September 22, 2024

The uncertainty and contingency of the post-pandemic era is dense with the ripples of reconstruction, and this structural disordered duality provides us with a perspective of the “Other.” The younger generation is facing with the emergence, development and impact of these extreme conditions. For them, “escaping” becomes an important method for observation and self-reflection. Hannah Arendt’s understanding of “judgment” suggests that it is often the dislocation in the process of practice and the sensory crisis brought by coercion that leads to a “lucid” escape from the self. In circumstances filled with randomness, new stories are written in a romantic way that opens up the imagination. This is precisely the origin of the exhibition, where the two artists’ accidental agreement on “escape” during their conversation unfolds the dramatic narrative of the exhibition with the structure of “holiday”.

The “holiday” is about “escaping” from a fixed and pre-determined thinking environment. Across the sea, in the sweltering heat of Bangkok, “exotic” encompasses both travel and escape, as well as reflection on the “Cartesian” self. Detaching from perceptual factors and forces, and sensitively capturing the environment around, empathetic understanding and exploration become part of the artists’ creative methods. The works of Hao Zecheng and Wan Peng embody the “painterly” touch through the alternation of chance and necessity, incorporating both poetry and meaning into bodily experience. The choice of elements in their works reflects an experiential judgment of memory, time, and images, showcasing a new logic of experience. The process and organisation of the artists’ visual treatment of the images is meticulously choreographed as a rhythmic progression of “events”. The artists repeatedly sketch reality in the flow of time, forming a theater of multiple poetic and meaningful logics.

In Hao Zecheng’s works, the depiction of real-life scenes presents a subjective way of recording, endowing hidden spirituality with fragments of experience. The familiar yet strange sense of time is captured through ephemeral, bubble-like moments, occurring by chance or unconsciously, but seeming to possess eternal life imagery. The works “capture” the figures in the image, the “flesh” of landscapes as the phantom of mediums, magnifying visual perception to the extreme. The solitary figure in front of the show windows, the flickering bonfire in the night light, are ritualistically presented the brief stay in the images, reflecting the spiritual facets of contemporary individuals in a fable-like form.

In Wan Peng’s works, each stage features specific dramatic conflicts, utilizing correspondences between different pasts and the present, as well as between the same present and different places, to create layers of new information and meaning through the transformation of experience. Wan Peng engages in “hallucinatory” dialogues by combining different active textures in continuous and discrete states. As the artist puts it, “Every time I pick up a brush, only the next second of me knows how to paint, just like traveling; only my future self knows whom I will meet.” The artist views the canvas as holding a hidden human kindness, subtle yet significant, with momentary and difficult choices imbuing the image with vitality. On the canvas, like stars and moons emerging from the settled night sky, luminous as daylight yet subtly obscured, cloud patterns, crescent moons, and tree shadows cycle through contours and reflections in purple pools. This forms an ephemeral poetry, where the contrast between texture and brushstrokes links unfamiliar spatial forms through techniques of ambiguity and fictional dislocation, presenting a “still” vibrancy.

In the “holiday,” the subject approaches time and space from the perspective of an observer, while the works serve as mediums linking “exotic” orders and atmospheres. “Holiday” is joyful; within the brief and uncertain form of life experience, the self becomes part of the landscape perception, and the works become a comprehensive phenomenon containing bodily experience and emotional value. As pursued by the two artists, in the humid heat of August in Bangkok, the exhibition constructs an unconscious, spontaneous memoir of the relationship between people and landscapes, connecting stars, prayers, and love on the spiritual intermediary of the natural land.