Exhibitions and Events

Schoeni Art Gallery is delighted to present Passage of Time, solo exhibition by Chinese sculptor Zheng Lu, opening on Thursday October 6th 2011 at the Hollywood Road branch gallery. This will mark the 33-year-old artist’s fourth solo to date, and also his debut exhibition in Hong Kong before his public installation project unveils at the Tuen Mun MTR station later this year.

Passage of Time will showcase a selection of Zheng Lu’s most dazzling and impressive works to date, from Water in Dripping in 2009 to his newest installation series Bow without Arrow made in 2011, all of which demonstrate his astonishing ability to completely manipulate metal – his primary material, which is shaped masterfully into unimaginable forms every time and turned into powerful carriers of symbols and mediums for reflection.  

Influenced by his family tradition, Zheng Lu has been practicing Chinese calligraphy since childhood. He also has an affinity with poetry and is a poet himself. These two factors are the connection between his abiding love of Chinese texts and characters that is repeatedly expressed in his creations. For example, in the captivating piece Mayfly (2010), which Zheng Lu described to be “a piece for the remembrance of his disastrous youth,” he recreates the form of insects’ body with an expressive brush stroke on the wall using stainless steel and fills the wings with incredibly delicate and precisely arranged carvings of tiny Chinese characters that read a script from one of his youth poems. 

Furthermore, in the piece Water in Dripping (2010) (also to be showcased in the upcoming exhibition), he took inspirations from a phrase in a poem by a famous Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi: “No object is sharper than running water and no mirror is better than still water”, and froze the mesmerizing movement of water being splashed by capturing it into a stainless steel installation.

  

As the Chinese art critic Xia Yun wrote, Zheng Lu’s sculptures do not only display the striking skills of a sculptor and demonstrate a perfect state of harmony and unity between poetry, calligraphy and graphical depiction, but they also carry messages and symbols that are even more profound: symbols such as reality and falsity, presence and lack, object and without object, light and darkness, movement and stillness, transience and eternity. Once observed closely, one would find Taoist inspirations and Buddhist wisdoms about the self, nature and spirituality there waiting for viewers to discover and feel. 

Born in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, Zheng Lu lives and woks in Beijing. He graduated from Lu Xun Fine Art Academy, Shenyang, in 2003 and Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, in 2007. While still in training, he was awarded the LVMH Young Artists’ Award “Tribute to the Impressionists” in 2005. Zheng Lu spent five months in Paris at The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in 2006. “China Gold” at the Musee Miallol in Paris was the first major museum show featuring his work in 2008. Followed by “Fresh Vision – The Contemporary Young Artists Invites the Exhibition,” in 2009 at the Suzhou Art Museum and “The Right to Protest,” at Museum On the Seam, Jerusalem in 2010. Recently, Zheng Lu participated in an art-installation project partnering with the Hong Kong and Shenzhen MTR Corporation. His piece designed for the Longhua station in Shenzhen was unveiled last month.