Exhibitions and Events

Schoeni is delighted to present Zhang Lin Hai’s most recent solo exhibition since his much acclaimed museum show, Stunned Speechless, at Beijing’s Today Art Museum in 2008. The Fading Sun will open at Schoeni Main Gallery on 14 October 2010, featuring Zhang Lin Hai’s latest oil paintings that embody a fresh style and outlook yet keeping the core humanistic essence of his art. Born in Shanghai in 1963, Zhang Lin Hai was adopted by his foster parents and brought up in the small village of Wang Jin Zhuang, located in She County. Plagued by illnesses as a child, Zhang suffered from polio which left him with a crippled leg. In many ways, Zhang’s turbulent life is tied up by desolation and sorrow; he had witnessed the devastation of the Cultural Revolution through his foster parents; survived his many illnesses and failed operations, living in a predominantly unequal society as a disabled; relentlessly fought his way to higher education, graduating from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 1990; struggled through poverty and endured the hardships of a country boy in a big city etc… All his past struggles and sufferings, or rather, his fate, have shaped the principal character of his work, one that articulates intense inner tension and feelings of melancholy, fear, despair, need for escape, agony and isolation.

Zhang Lin Hai is an exceptionally sensitive and honest artist, who has cultivated an instinctively personal style and world through his oeuvre that supercedes nature and reality, reaching mystery and depth. In fact, many of Zhang’s works are instantly recognisable by his signature depiction of bald young boys wandering through, or flying over, an arid wasteland or country village. Such imageries are fundamentally influenced by his village upbringing at She County, where boys often shaved their heads due to the strong heat and scarce chance for bathing. Zhang fused his childhood background along with his own adolescent dream of escaping or leaving the countryside. It is after all the dream of many young souls to abandon the village for the vibrant city life, and such escapism and liberation is conveyed through the artist’s depiction of the protagonist in flight, searching for the curious world outside the mountains. Zhang Lin Hai’s almost surrealistic representations, not only embrace the essence of one’s fate or destiny, maturation, blood and tears, but also the need of redemption in all of us, which the artist achieves for himself through his own act of painting.

However, in the Fading Sun series, Zhang Lin Hai has progressed the journey of these young boys, as a continuation of the odyssey in search of oneself and one’s strength. Zhang employed a palette of somber blue against earth tones with strong shadow effect. We no longer see any bald young boys flying across the mountains, but instead, they appear as young adolescents with growing hair who are trying to adopt to city life. It is no longer the illusory sense of liberation, but rather, the consequences of the escape that forces one to confront the cruelness of reality against the silhouette of the city and its skyscrapers. In one of the paintings from the collection of Fading Sun Series, the distorted figure struggles in agony between modernity – the city, and antiquity – the Forbidden City. He is portrayed hiding his head, and we do not know whether he is the bald country boy or the once bald kid from the country anymore. Zhang explained: “I realized for many years I was merely running towards an illusion: in reality, heaven does not exist. In this weird space of living, you feel tremendously naive and awkward because you cannot find a place for yourself.” Although Zhang Lin Hai’s paintings may appear to be increasingly gloomy, with added connotations to imprisonment and destruction, one must not overlook the glimmer of hope that can be found in them, such as the bubbles depicted in his recent work, which are reminiscent of childhood memories, as well as offering a sensation of hope, imagination and fantasy. Perhaps the sinking sun may radiate a strong sense of loneliness and expiration, yet it is known that the sun fades at dusk only to rise once again at dawn. Just like Zhang Lin Hai’s fate is filled with misfortunes, yet also embellished with unexpected strokes of luck.

Zhang Lin Hai had collaborated with Schoeni Art Gallery since 2000, thus had garnered international acclaim with artworks being sold at major international auctions and collections being held worldwide. He had participated in numerous exhibitions, including the three-man exhibition, along with Wang Yi Dong and Cai Guo Qiang at MKM Museum Küppersmühle in Germany in 2005, as well as the Chinart travelling museum show throughout major European cities between 2002 – 2004. Zhang Lin Hai now lives and works in Beijing.