Beijing Commune is now presenting Ge Yulu’s second solo exhibition “This One is Painting, So Is That One”. The exhibition will last from August 14th till September 25th.
For this exhibition, Ge Yulu disregards the main trajectory that has occupied his previous artistic practice, that is, to challenge the public and collective awareness through intervening in the social space with the carnal body. Instead, Ge Yulu returns to and further embraces painting as the medium that does not necessarily need conceptual understandings but only his physical and embodied involvement.
To be more precise, to mass-produce this series of still-life paintings acquires nothing creative but only Ge Yulu’s ability to retrieve his memory with it, that which has long been inscribed within his body. Such an almost immediate yet passive way of practice has led to what is now shown on the walls, on which the paintings seem to tell individual narratives as much as they disregard them. Ge Yulu’s autobiographical writings, not only printed on the engraved brass plates next to the canvas but the papers hung on the white wall, slowly unfold another means of “nothingness” in addition to the painted objects themselves.
As Ge Yulu said himself, “Both my paintings and my text refer to something complex yet are also blind by itself. It is this complicated nothingness that fulfills the exhibition where my emptied subjectivity lies in.” The graphics fill in the sight as much as they deprive the content of it. On the one hand, Ge Yulu seems to take a new approach distinguishably parted from his previous well-known works and, on the other hand, the attempt of using the fully concentrated bodily involvement to resist the highly demanding creativity is, in fact, the core of this exhibition,
In all, with the means to against mass production via producing works, to formulate new concepts in addition to deconstructing the existed ones, it is not simply the hierarchies among artistic mediums that Ge Yulu seeks to rediscuss via this exhibition but is rather the primary approach, the symbol of “Ge Yulu” conceptualized by himself. This exhibition can either be seen as another means of evoking collective and shared public experience, or that of encountering a new way of making conceptual art. Yet, none of them is precise enough comparing to reading this simply as a bold self-exposure.
