In Walking Penumbra, Zheng Chongbin Searches for Truth

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Zheng Chongbin’s rendering of Walking Penumbra, the focus of his new solo show at the INK Studio Beijing

ART REVIEW

Walking Penumbra, a new solo exhibition of artworks by California- and Shanghai-based artist Zheng Chongbin in Beijing reveals the artist quest to understand how history and memories are formed in an environment where everything is in constant flux.

BY KAZAD

Image: Unknown Formation, an Ink and acrylic on xuan paper, nylon and aluminum board painting by Zheng Chongbin is one of the new works in Walking Penumbra, his new solo exhibition at the INK Studio Beijing

Zheng Chongbin, Unknown Formation, Ink and acrylic on xuan paper, nylon and aluminum board, 179 x 205 cm, 2018. Image: INK studio Beijing

BEIJING, CHINA—A major solo exhibition of works by California- and Shanghai-based artist Zheng Chongbin has opened at the INK studio Beijing. Titled Walking Penumbra, the exhibition provides a better understanding of Zheng’s artistic career and, in a way bring context to his multi-disciplinary practice. Included in the show are his newest video and immersive light-and-space installation, acrylic and video installations. Also on display is a selection of Zheng’s most recent paintings.

Central to the works on display is an integrated exploration of the living material world and how, as humans, our perception is shaped by the environment and constantly changing events around us. A major work in the show is Walking Penumbra. The installation is a sequel and counterpoint to the acclaimed installation Wall of Skies that was exhibited during the 11th Shanghai Biennale in 2016. The installation confronted its viewers with an imposing crystallized ink wall in a perception-shifting non-rectilinear white space that persistently challenged their understanding of reality.

Walking Penumbra is a continuation of Zheng’s investigation into how people are shaped by their experiences as they navigate the spacial confluence of sounds, images, and lights. In the installation, viewers are inserted into an inchoate black space of layered shadow, skylight, moving image, and sound. In their movement through space, they continuously discover and recover their orientation in relation to a kaleidoscopic flux of images and sensations. The experience not only challenged their understanding of their environment but also influenced their perception of reality and how they responded to the space in which they have found themselves.

In creating the Walking Penumbra Zheng delved into history, examining how the experience of light and shadow have functioned as central metaphors of philosophy from Shakyamuni Buddha’s “Shadow Cave” to Plato’s “Cave of Shadows.” In all the examinations, Zheng found credence in the principles of Zhuang Zhou, an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BC. Often known as Zhuangzi, the philosopher used fables to introspect on the foibles of the binary relationships of human experiences articulated by other philosophers. “Only Zhuangzi, however, makes the penumbra—the luminous border between light and shadow—his central image for our existence; it being at once entirely without autonomy or independent existence and yet entirely self-realizing and self-so within its own experiential context,” notes Zheng

Also on display is Actant Memories, a new series of translucent acrylic and video installations derived from the artist’s solo exhibition at the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed Asia Society Texas Center, Houston in November 2017. In Actant Memories, a freestanding sculpture mediates a homologous spatial play of image, light, shadow, and penumbra. In a way, the piece questions the concept of memory formation and how history is always in constant flux based on new experiences, findings, and effervescent actualizations.

Zheng Chongbin‘s installations were informed by his understanding of the Chinese philosophy of the world, which is in total contradicts the postulations of Western philosophers. He notes:

Unlike Western philosophers, who tended to embrace an ontology consisting of objects and categories, the pre-modern Chinese saw the world as made up of processes in flux—chaotic flows of matter and energy that came into transient coherent order and then dissipated. Today, this process-based worldview undergirds contemporary mathematics and scientific inquiry, from chaos theory to ecology, as well as philosophical discourses such as post-humanism and new materialism. Through geometry, space, light, moving image, material, and process, my work places these different worlds in dialog as human experience.

In addition to all the installations, several of Zheng’s latest abstract paintings are also on display. In his paintings, Zheng explores the natural geometry of fractals, the Euclidean geometry of human design, and the abstract, mathematical topology of continuous spaces to reveal how the environment influences man’s perception and understanding of himself. Using ink as the dominant medium of expression, Zheng who started developing his painting in the early 1980’s, unravels the living material world in its unfolding, dynamic engagement with embodied human experience.

Like his installations, Zheng Chongbin in his paintings questions how knowledge is formed through continues layering, collapsing and re/layering and re/collapsing of infinite events. Obviously, his attempt is not for an epistemological victory but mainly to show the complexities associated with the formation of knowledge and memories. It is for this reasons that he embraced Chinese philosophy. Even then, he continues to quest for answers:

Central to my practice is the pre-modern Daoist concept that the natural, inorganic world of energy and matter is living and always changing. If this is the case, how do we attune our perceptions to produce knowledge of this ever-changing world? How are we changed by our phenomenological (perceptual) entanglement with the phenomena (events) of the world? In turn, how do we, through our engagement with the world, actively create-transform ourselves and the world’s being and becoming?

The collection of works by Zheng Chongbin at the INK studios is an opportunity to experience his creative oeuvre. His quest for how knowledge and memories are formed has greatly influenced his creation. In his search for answers, he dug into history and found inspiration in important Chinese philosophers who in their writings gave credence to liminal space. The existence of the liminal space provides the venue for the interaction of confluence of ideas. In other words, it is antithetical to a binary relationship.

Zheng Chongbin is an occupant of that liminal space. Original from China, Zheng lives and works in California. In his transition between two worlds -China and America- he has inserted himself into that space where his identity is shaped by an amalgamation of thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. Even his works reflect that liminality. Although they are based on concepts propagated by Chinese philosophers, they were created using Western media.