Artist’s Reception: Friday, 21 April 2017, 6 to 8pm

Exhibition Period: 21 April – 3 June 2017

鄭力   ZHENG Li     《晴雪》    Pure as Snow 2002     水墨 設色 紙本    Ink and Colour on Paper   233 x 135 cm 第十屆全國美展銅獎作品 Bronze Award, 10th National Exhibition of Fine Arts, China 圖檔由藝術家及漢雅軒提供     Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery

Hanart TZ Gallery is honoured to present Zheng Li: Reflections of the Classical Garden, the first major solo exhibition in Hong Kong of Hangzhou-based ink artist Zheng Li. His works have been shown in major exhibitions in China, including ‘One Hundred Years of Chinese Painting’ at the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), and the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts where his works have won numerous prizes. His paintings are highly sought after and are in a number of private and museum collections.

The exhibition features 18 important works of Zheng Li’s distinctive shanshui (landscape) art, which infuses classical shanshui painting concepts with the artist’s uniquely innovative interpretations of brushplay and scene.

鄭力   ZHENG Li 《我亦有亭深竹里，也思歸去聽秋聲》 ‘I have a pavilion deep in the bamboo forest, where I long to listen to the autumn wind’ 2015     水墨 設色 紙本    Ink and Colour on Paper   184 x 372 cm 圖檔由藝術家及漢雅軒提供     Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery

Zheng Li’s artistic vision is beautifully articulated through the juxtapositions between the contained beauty of the classical garden and the vastness of nature which they encapsulate. The artist’s supremely confident use of inkplay is grounded in a mastery of brushwork, allowing him to create unique innovations within the lineage of the ink-painting language, making his work part of a contemporary evolution of Chinese shanshui painting rather than a subversion of it.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Zheng Li’s tour de force, Downstream. This 7-metre-long handscroll, created for the 2016 inaugural exhibition of the new Gongwang Art Museum in Hangzhou, is Zheng Li’s ‘response’ to the traditional masterpiece Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains by the famed Yuan-dynasty painter Huang Gongwang (1269–1354). With Downstream, Zheng Li has forged a new chapter in the literati tradition of ‘copying’ or ‘interpreting’ ancient masters, by painting Huang Gongwang’s famous landscape scroll entirely in reverse. While Huang Gongwang’s original painting depicts the beautifully detailed landscape as the eye moves upstream along the river, in Zheng Li’s scroll we follow the landscape downstream; in a sense a reversal of both perspective and of time. Zheng Li’s tour de force also has the distinction of depicting Huang’s scroll in its entirety, uniting the two sections of Huang’s painting that were famously separated in the 17^th century when the work was burnt in half, after which the two sections, known respectively as The Remaining Mountain and The Master Wuyong Scroll, passed into different collections over the centuries. The supreme technical skill and mastery of brushwork required to both imitate and reverse Huang Gongwang’s work to create Downstream is a testament to Zheng Li’s painterly skill and innovative daring.

鄭力   ZHENG Li   《故園心眼》   Reflections of the Classical Garden 2017     水墨 設色 紙本 Ink and Colour on Paper   240 x 128 cm 圖檔由藝術家及漢雅軒提供     Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery

Zheng Li also has an uncanny understanding and affinity for the aesthetics and spirit of the classical Chinese garden. He not only is able to capture the spiritual ambience of the scholar’s garden, he is also able to fashion uniquely imaginative garden compositions based on his own taste and sensibilities. At first the eye is captivated by the harmonious forms and placement of his doorways and windows, furnishings and decorative objects, bamboo and rocks, walls and pavilions; and then one slowly discovers that the overall compositional effect is like that of a mural painting on a temple wall, infusing Zheng Li’s garden paintings with the pure atmosphere of a sacred place. His works conjure a sense of intriguing duality, of both reality and illusion, like the reflection of the moon in water or a flower glowing in a distant garden, bringing into being an atmospheric world where the viewer’s own mood and sensibility become part of the setting.

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鄭力     ZHENG Li     《順水圖》     Downstream 2016     水墨 古紙本     Ink on Antique Paper     35 x 696 cm 吳湖帆家藏咸豐五年制古墨。 陸儼少自用古澄泥硯。 中古富陽竹漿紙。 Painted using ink stick with maker’s mark and dated 1855, originally in the collection of Master Wu Hufan. Antique ink stone originally owned by Master Lu Yanshao. Antique Fuyang bamboo paper. 圖檔由藝術家及漢雅軒提供     Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery

The opening reception in the presence of the artist will take place on Friday, 21 April 2017, from 6-8pm at the gallery. (Exhibition until 3^rd June).

鄭力   ZHENG Li   《瀟灑出塵》   Soaring above the World 2013     水墨 紙本    Ink on Paper   41 x 172.5 cm 圖檔由藝術家及漢雅軒提供     Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery