Leng Guangmin: Light always stays on the surface

Leng Guangmin: Shells garner Linging Light

Curator:Lu Xiangyi

Exhibition period:2023.10.13-11.28

Place:Tang Contemporary Art Center Hong Kong Central Space

Tang Contemporary Art Center announced that it will represent the post-80s artist Leng Guangmin in Asia, and will launch Leng Guangmin's new solo exhibition "Light, Always Stays on the Surface" at 5 pm on October 13, 2023 at Hong Kong Central Space.

Exhibition byLu XiangyiCurated is Leng Guangmin’s first solo exhibition at Tang Contemporary Art Center, which will feature nearly twenty of the artist’s latest paintings. The gallery will broadcast two live tours on the Instagram platform on the afternoon of October 13th, 4pm (Chinese) and 4:30pm (English). Please search the account "tangcontemporaryart" to watch.

Starting from Leng Guangmin's first exhibition "Seeing Appearance" in 2013, one concept he wants to convey is: appearance is everything. There is no need to explore the connotation. The connotation is empty and uncertain. The appearance is always there and extremely clear. After a stage, all research must return to this most objective starting point and start again. Leng Guangmin consciously concretized this representation and constantly gave it certain characteristics, such as "material", "hard", "fragile" and "without vitality and emotion", slowly forming the concept of a "shell". The work no longer looks like a flat wall, but can be extended into any object. The artist combines objects and images in a certain logical order, which is his current basic work. Due to the properties of "shell", what it creates is often an alienated landscape, which is as follows: "gorgeous and empty", "disappeared without emotion", "broken and quiet". This represents a kind of world as understood by the artist.

Leng Guangmin's solo exhibition "Shell, Just Like a Cicada's Wings" in early 2023 formally proposed the concept of "shell" and explained its properties. This exhibition "Light Only Stays on the Surface" reminds us of a spatial structure state in the picture: light passes through the gaps between the "shells", but the light on the shells stays, and we can see Get the whole picture. The gaps between these "shells" remind people of the phrase "a sparse space allows a horse to race, but an airtight space is airtight." This is exactly what the artist hopes for this contrasting rhythm to exist in his paintings. These shells are put together in different forms, or come together, or fall apart. There is a sense of process in between, and this sense of process is tied to the logic of image construction. Different logics extend into different series of works, sometimes calm and restrained, sometimes violently turbulent. For example, "Ice Cream" is more restrained, while "Birds" is more intense.

It is not difficult to see that Leng Guangmin’s creative methods have undergone considerable changes in recent years. Around 2017, the artist tried to make constant subtractions in the picture, which led to his constant self-doubt: when objects are abstracted to a certain extent in the picture, has the space of language been compressed to the extent that it limits the possibilities of materials and images? . Therefore, 2020 has become a node for its transformation. Leng Guangmin began to try additions in the painting, introducing new language changes, releasing more of the contingency of language and the expressive power of materials. In Leng Guangmin's new works, the pictures become richer and he has a more proficient grasp of the use of previous tools. The gaps between the lines cut out the materialized mosaic scales of pixels, and the weaving logic of the images is like the longitude and latitude lines of cartography. , capturing his new language with strong personal characteristics.

"Class nature" is defined in Leng Guangmin's context as a clue to constructing an image: an image has different levels of changes, such as size, priority, coldness and warmth, and the rhythm of change can be found. They are not more or less important, just It's like the equality of life. But in fact, there may be hierarchical differences between different species, and the same species and the same ethnic group will also have such differences. The artist weaves together these differences and the rhythm of "size, urgency, warmth and coldness" in image elements with this hierarchical division to form a picture that guides the construction of the picture through the natural order of objects and the image itself.

Although Leng Guangmin's creations always start from the "surface", his in-depth study of materials and tools and production labor have made the surface of his creations rugged. The picture is a reduced reality. The peeling picture makes the real world fragmented, but the objects are at ease. A flower, two leaves, a pile of shells, they are empty and full of power, showing a harmonious negativity. . The strangeness of the original object forms a thin film of perception with the viewer. Just like the theme of the exhibition, light passes through the folds, passes through the gaps in the picture, falls on the surface of the object, and stays in our gaze.

About the artist

Leng Guangmin was born in Qingzhou, Shandong in 1986. As a leader among the post-80s painting artists, Leng Guangmin had already very consciously explored a personal path that broke the traditional oil painting creation paradigm when he was studying in the Oil Painting Department of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. In contrast to the accumulation of paint strokes, Leng Guangmin uses cutting movements to open up a new physical space in the painting. Cutting is not only his creative method, but also his attitude towards art, which is sharp, decisive and unquestionable. Leng Guangmin uses relatively constant painting techniques to continuously dissect materials or images. They may be guided by certain clues, but there is no theme that can be accurately summarized. The most charming thing about Leng Guangmin's paintings lies in the ubiquitous tension formed by confrontation in the paintings. It is the collision and complementation of colors, the flatness and scratches of materials, and the hard edges and gradients of texture. , are the negative and positive shapes in structure. It is through this that Leng Guangmin refines the inner order under a certain complex object image, an extremely abstract state that is constantly changing and can only be revealed through object images.

Leng Guangmin's important solo exhibitions include: 2023 "Light always stays on the surface" (Tang Contemporary Art Center, Hong Kong, China); 2023 "Shell, just like cicada wings" (MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan); 2019 West Bund Personal project for the fair (Shanghai, China); 2018 “Ripples” (MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan); 2017 “Perfect Destruction” (Hive Beijing Contemporary Art Center, Beijing, China); 2014 “Leng Guangmin” (Hive Contemporary Art Center, Beijing, China); 2013 "Seeing Appearance" (Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China), etc.

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