Best known for his monochromatic ink brush paintings, the San Francisco-based Chinese artist presents new works expanding on a previous theme in his latest exhibition “Amorphous Geometry by Zheng Chongbin.”
His works eschew traditional representations and instead look toward abstraction and beyond the material world for new artistic possibilities.
Zheng says that when he paints he thinks of a series of words such as “mass, weight, surface, scale, tangible, palpable, physicality, light, depth, frontal, space, immediacy, scissor, cut, the back of the paper, sculpture, object, cast, negotiating and absence.”
He explains, “I like to treat paper as intermediate material to hold the ink, wash and acrylic and whatever materials I feel like using. I am building something rather than painting. All the materials that I have applied will react and bleach through the paper, and this often creates a sculptural effect.”
“The paper will then pick up or cast all the settlement from underneath. To bring this all alive, water is then applied to the works. I like the feeling of treating painting as an object making process. It allows me to shift away from familiarity and start wondering,” he adds.
Amorphous Geometry by Zheng Chongbin runs from 13 Oct – 4 Nov 2012 at Valentine Willie Fine Art.
As first published in ARTINFO.com