Slide

The Task of Alchemy

The Task of Alchemy

Artist:Pocono Zhao Yu

Curator:Zhang Tingzhi

2022.10.22 – 2023.01.07

Le Soleil

Charles Baudelaire

Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,

Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,

Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés

Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

In Charles Baudelaire’s prose, the defence against the differences in reality is portrayed in a fighting manner. Those images, opposing concepts, and the gap between words and objects are refined into the creation by artist Pocono Zhao Yu. Intellect tends to turning events into a once-experienced moment, and without thinking about it, in that manner, nothing is left. Discomfort and integration with regional, cultural, political, and racial differences, forced or active, have long been a daily experience. In the scattered cultures of various places, of time moving forward, and the intricate cultural symbols, there are pushes and collisions at any time. People are the hidden images in Pocono Zhao Yu’s works: they signify history, testify to existing experiences, yet formless pasts. This hidden image, which reveals some deeply hidden symbolism, in the gaze, the retelling of the tales, the looped songs, and the assemblage of illustrations are the spoils of war plundered from the ghostly image of the “Helios”.

 

Alchemy is defined as a precursor to medieval chemistry, people concerned with the transmutation of matter and attempts to convert base metals into gold or to find elixir, while in contemporary society, alchemy is also used to describe people’s conscious participation in transformative life processes. Through her works, Pocono Zhao Yu questions the truth of history and explored the unreliability of history. Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to grasp a “real” experience that is in opposition to what people’s normalised, which denaturalised the lives suggest. Rather than being the product of facts firmly rooted in memory, what it accumulates in memory is often a collection of subconscious material.

Proust has proposed “involuntary memory”, the past is somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and is exactly in some objects (or in the senses caused by objects) manifested. The artist often reconstructs and reorganises scenes through the copies, mirrors, old photos, and texts, which altogether become the new narrators. At the same time, she also inevitably needs to return to the historical context to find answers, so as to face the unknown future. What The Task of Alchemy emphasises here is the archaeological seal and the wordless anatomy, which allude to the meaning of seeking, fleeing and defecting – the fire of the cave flickered, and she began to measurements and  walking.

Cited:

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play,

Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;

Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,

Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)

Exhibitions

过往展览

2022.10.22-2023.01.07

Amber

Artist:Duan Yifan
2022.10.22-2023.01.07

A N G E L U S

Artist:Hannah Benassi
2022.08.06-10.09

Dangerous Complicity

Artist:Guo Yujian
2022.08.06-10.09

Eclipse

Artist:Lin Shu
2022.10.22-2023.01.07

炼金的任务

艺术家:赵玉
2022.10.22-2023.01.07

琥珀

艺术家:段一凡
2022.10.22-2023.01.07

A N G E L U S

艺术家:汉娜·贝纳西
2022.08.06-10.09

危险同谋

艺术家:郭宇剑

Art Channel

艺术频道

ARCH REVIEW | Gaze in the Dim Glow

“The Task of Alchemy”, Pocono Zhao Yu’s solo exhibition at Arch Gallery, presents a subtle sense of time traveling. As the title of the exhibition alludes to, it is as if the smelting and mysterious deeds of some spiritual objects. Within the whisper that fluttering outside of time, this enormous task is under the invisible dome of time.

ARCH REVIEW | Guo Yujian :Dangerous Complicitiy

When looking at Guo Yujian’s works, what have been depicted is always in a state of flow, and the secret words that are related to each other become images that avoid us and approach us. The work that takes shape on the canvas in our sight is yet to come, in transition, about to embrace change, and it will not push us away until the feeling is fulfil.

ARCH REVIEW | Making Complicity

When the painting is really close to us, the first thing that appears to our eyes is this Le cimetière marin[1] written by Valéry in 1922. The curators Hu Yihang and Zhang Tingzhi, together with artist Guo Yujian, divided the exhibition “Dangerous Complicity” in the gallery into three chapters with words and symbols: imagination, a plateau, and a theatre.

ARCH 采访 | 朱湘闽

朱湘闽的作品在愉悦的状态中,凸显了轻盈、弥散的线条与形态,层叠的不同色块和材料之间强调了艺术家自身的意识与感知。画面中直观的力量感,是艺术家对“矛盾和悖论在身体里形成完整的统一“的思考,形象间释放的情绪在思想的过滤与分解后,营造了更有流动性的感官体验。

ARCH 采访 | 谢燚

他的作品长期以来从“劳动”这个常用的词汇出发,不断向现实世界里以“语言”为基础的权利追问。“我只希望我认为重要的东西能被大家知道,那就是”具体的劳动“在现实世界中是如何”做功“的。”

ARCH 采访 | 薛若哲

“绘画没有办法不诚恳,这是一种无法伪装的媒介。我对绘画的诚恳和机械的、拾得的图像产生的化学反应感兴趣,尤其是当网络图像和铜板线腐蚀这种必须要经过转化才能成型的绘制方式相遇,就形成了有意思的关系。”

Tuesday – Sunday
10.00am – 6.00pm

ARCH Gallery
Yinjiachong Rd, Tianxin District
410000 Changsha

星期二 – 星期日
上午10.00 – 下午6.00

湖南省长沙市天心区殷家冲路
1123文创园一楼
ARCH GALLERY

© 2021  Arch Gallery all rights reserved. Email: info@archgallery.net
Site by XYCO