Xu Zhenbang: Look Again

Pékin Fine Arts is pleased to host Look Again, the 1st solo exhibition of Xu Zhenbang (b. 1990 Shenzhen) in Hong Kong. The exhibition is comprised of mixed media paintings, carved painting interventions, and reconstructed paintings.

Xu Zhenbang, born and raised in Shenzhen, is finishing his master’s degree at the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy’s Oil Painting Department. His work was recently selected for exhibit in Beijing’s CAFA Museum, in the 2nd CAFAM – Future Exhibition/OBSERVER – CREATOR, The Reality Representation of Chinese Young Art, co-curated by Xu Bing and Palais de Tokyo curator Jean de Loisy. With sponsorship from Hong Kong’s K11 Foundation, the CAFA Museum’s group exhibition of young artists of the present – and hopefully the future – travelled from Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, to Beijing’s CAFA Museum, continuing on, in abridged miniexhibit iterations to Shanghai and Hong Kong. Xu Zhenbang’s work first came to the attention of this gallery in the OBSERVER-CREATOR exhibition at Beijing’s CAFA Museum, where the final group of 80+ artists selected – including Xu Zhenbang – (all under 35 years of age) are described by the curators as “makers” who ‘inhabit intermediate realms linking art with technology and everyday life with art.’

In his preface to the OBSERVER-CREATOR exhibition catalogue, Xu Bing describes the curatorial process of selecting and categorizing thematically young “makers”, citing one group as those who practice the blending of new technology and art, able to “affirm the human warmth within new technologies and everyday science” as a “…manifesto in response to a reality that seems uninteresting, flat and uncreative”. Xu’s recent work is firmly rooted in these ethos and observations.

This exhibition marks the first time a large body of Xu’s mixed media paintings are exhibited. Xu’s painting style re-assembles banal images from modern media, the web, the street, and other pedestrian sources. He strips them and then reassembles them into visual objects and plastic patterns, appropriating op-art details from construction sites, roadside detours, and electronic signals. Xu questions painting norms, while challenging our notions of visual memory formation.