Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Zhang Enli was born in Jilin, China in 1965. He received his BFA from the College of Arts, Wuxi University of Light Industry in 1989, and has had exhibitions in museums and art galleries in the UK, the US, Italy, Switzerland, India, Korea, Hong Kong and China. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. For him, painting is a way to express life. He always starts from the most tangible things in his daily life; whether it is a bucket, a cupboard, or an action of an individual, it might capture his attention and ignite his enthusiasm in a similar way. In the transition from lines to planes and between different planes, his unique painting technique fully conducts an intriguing dialogue between media and appearances while continuously exploring the dynamics between “representation” and “presentation.” In this exhibition, Zhang will create a site-specific work by painting onsite throughout five days since the exhibition opens. The work will begin from the first-floor MOCA Studio gallery space and extend to the canopy at the museum entrance and the ceiling of the museum hallway. In these spaces, the artist is going to paint both eye-catching, concrete images and abstract expressions, and embed elements and objects in these spaces into his work, creating an installation of space painting that seems to exist since the beginning. Through such a dialectic dialogue between “existence and nothingness,” he invites the audience to partake in a creative activity that connects the topic of existence and the thinking of visual presentation. In addition to the live creation in various spaces of the museum, the exhibition also includes Zhang’s works of an angry-youth period from the 1990s and a series of recent works, in which he has moved onto his dedicated study of translating images. In his recent works, Zhang has deliberately avoided political and cultural symbols as his painting elements, diverging from the ’85 New Wave and discovering a new form of aesthetics and artistic practice for Chinese contemporary art. His painting does not propose any questions to Chinese contemporary society, neither is it searching for a certain answer or trying to reveal a certain outcome. Instead, he returns to painting itself, and meticulously explores the process of artistic creation to seek that instantaneous feeling. Self-Sustained embodies the artist’s journey of exploring the meaning of painting; and through the presentation of the works, he intentionally allows the audience to experience the traces of artistic creation that do not seem to exist. As Zhang Enli has said, “It would be fine as long as those disappeared traces had once existed!”