The Invisible Horizon

Linlin Chen Reid / RoundSpace Gallery

28°-28’-4”-N,-98°-49’-3”-E / Oil on canvas 100×140cm / 2022

AroundSpace Gallery is honored to present The Invisible Horizon, a solo exhibition of Beijing and New York-based artist George Chang, in December 2022, showcasing his most recent works.

Educated in New York, Chang’s works are inevitably influenced by the second generation of abstract expressionists, whose art features the expressive and bold use of color, as well as the freedom of classic composition and a departure from any figurative images. Employing a nearly abstract approach, Chang is certainly not shy of using a lavish palette and bold brushwork. On his canvases, masses of colors appear to materialize a half-real and half-imagined world. 

His lighthearted rendering with paint created some unexpected effects, yet did not outshine his skillful command of the brush. In his 2022 work, 39° 57’ 7” N, 116° 39’ 42” E, a 100 × 140cm (39 × 55 in) oil painting, Chang covered the bottom half of the canvas with a thin layer of red paint, and contrasted this with a pale green tree-like shape in the upper right, creating a strong but also effortless image.  

Despite using oil painting as his primary medium, Chang constantly returns to his roots and his art unintentionally reveals the legacy of traditional Chinese painting. Once troubled by finding his own path, Chang drew inspiration from Chinese landscape paintings made by pre-Yuan Dynasty (prior to the 14th Century) artists. In those masterpieces, Chang discovered a world where the mountains and rivers were represented by their spirits rather than portrayed by their shapes. From there Chang understands how to reconcile abstract and figurative styles, Eastern and Western aesthetics, as well as how to reflect his personal feelings associated with his native land. 

In his My Home and Wherever in the Waste, Chang used geometric forms to portray landscapes and architecture. They are neither 100 percent landscape paintings nor abstract paintings, but strike the viewer as an impression or recreation of a landscape, instead of a naturalistic representation.

English art critic John Berger (1926-2017) considered that “[t]he stillness of the image was symbolic of timelessness. ...... painting through its very stillness referred, was a substratum, a ground of timelessness.” In Chang’s art we see moments of the timelessness of painting which form a strong personal style. Like the horizon, which at times may be invisible, we know it is always there, and it never disappears.

Observation of George Chang's Work in the Perspective of Image Rhetoric

Zi Lin

Go West / Oil on canvas 120x120cm / 2020

Artist George Chang and his work Go West (2020) featured a distinguished gesture with the rest of works in the exhibition. At an 80 x 80 canvas, this work is significantly smaller than the other two pieces mentioned above, but in this small painting space, one can find a gesture of painting that runs opposite to almost works in this exhibition - a gesture that is opposed to image rhetoric. In George Chang’s works, there is no clear figure, nor his discussion about extensive reference beyond the painting itself by establishing symbolic figures. This strategy, if it can be called a strategy, is very different from that of Wu Chen, Qiu Ruixiang, and other artists. In the other direction, Go West (2020) is no conventional type of abstract painting, for the viewer can still vaguely distinguish the cultural scenes it refers to and the figures that appear in them - though these figures are hardly interesting nor visually appealing - they are the nearby waste dumps or the distant factories and chimneys. The artist here seems to have no interest in subject matter, figures, ambience, nor pigment texture. At the same time, it does not mean that this is a work from the direction of rational knowledge, because there is nothing that can be perceived as knowledge nor theorized. The viewer’s attempts to understand the work from these angles are doomed to be futile, while the sense of oppression caused by the black coloring filling the painting during observation may cause mild discomfort.

Detail

What a mind-boggling riddle! According to the artist, he was fascinated by the impression of villages and towns passing by in the window of the train during the night rides when he took night trains several times through the years. Only one or two strong light sources illuminate a part of a building or street in the endless darkness  - this creates a temporary theatricality and dramaticality, and the scene only exists for about three seconds before disappearing in the darkness again and it would have never been seen again. The artist said that the original intention of this series of work was to recreate and pieces together the mental image from these brief fragmented impressions. Studied in Chicago and New York for eight years, the artist’s academic background is the American abstract expressionism, but this is also a style that the artists tries to avoid. In the painting, the extensive references to the illusion of space brought by the local figures is reduced as much as possible with the artist’s efforts of inserting blurring objects. For example, in the lower part of the picture, the neat geometric part created by scraping pigments is isolated in the lower part of the picture by a black “waste pile” figure surrounding it. The spatial relationship between this “waste pile” and the bright factory building at the top of the picture falls into a vague state.

Detail

On the right side of the relatively clear image of the distant factory building, a brown space with unidentified meaning appears excessively huge, breaking the spatial logic brough by the factory building. The visual system constructed by George Chang in Go West (2020) is a real deconstruction system. It seems that any definite figure and spatial relationship implies some kind of danger in the artist’s mind, while the artist keeps walking on the edge of this danger. I personally very much approve of George Chang’s work and his creative stance, and I think it is a really experimental gesture. Although George Chang’s works are not suitable for collection as interior decoration from the point of view of commodities, I think his works are very good pieces of art. Its discussion happened in the existentialist level, outside of the image rhetoric. His works are opposed to the decorative and is incompatible with the artificial romance that floods the world of painting today - behind all these particularities, we can see the artist’s meticulous thinking and poignant grasp of these issues.

Crystal Playground

A person places an apple on the table and then enters the apple’s interior to listen to the vast silence within; is such a person’s pursuit of something so insignificant due to cowardice?  Although more people may be obsessed with or possess a worldly façade, those who see from the inside are not impressed—they find that all that they see and feel is not particularly worthy of admiration or surprise.   The shy and the innocent have given up their place like Alice in Wonderland when she falls into the rabbit hole and discovers that there is an unexpected open plain hidden within.

The exploration of the interior is a kind of absolute where the limits of matter may also be a part of the world’s fundamental principles. Of course, not all these fundamental principles are practical, especially within the vast personal domain. The alchemists of the Middle Ages peered into the base of their slender-necked flasks as they assiduously strove to crystallize a large fern leaf, ignoring such worldly questions as ‘What is the use of this?’  Their behavior is in and of itself a search for pure joy.  Imagine relying on experiments to achieve this lonely pursuit of a dream.  Discovering the hidden and unknown secrets of the past was an ostensible driving force, but the more obvious motivation lies in their astonishing devotion to the fundamental principles of matter.

George Chang’s paintings do not correspond to the visible world.  The size of his paintings are so small they might seem to lack ambition, but his unusual composition truly has a uniquely singular perspective that belongs to the endless fantasy that surges out of matter’s interior world.  It is like the integration of science and magic: art can also merge with magic, or perhaps all three elements strive for the same purpose to discover “the world that does not exist in this world.”

Fundamental principles are characteristically microcosmic; thus, Chang lets his imagination run wild as he endeavors to establish precise physical models, chemical molecular structures, and even architectural forms.  Although what he expresses may be extremely hard to believe, he does it with complete earnestness.  Scientific consensus in understanding the mysterious principles of matter, however, is elusive: for example, there are numerous models depicting the phenomenon of atomic nuclei like the droplet model, optical model, unified model, or the single-particle shell model, but none of them are fully applicable to all phenomena and processes.  In fact, these models have had very little revolutionary impact on humanity’s process of understanding atomic nuclei.  As such, Chang’s use of the art form to adapt evidence and blur the lines is justifiable. He furthermore creates a kind of conjectural formula where the distortions of this mischievous practical joke may perhaps lead to the essential core.

Beauty is a part of the core of all things.  Science also contains beauty.  Even the ordinary person knows this but does not ask why, just as D.H. Lawrence wrote in his volume of poetry, “Pansies:”  I like relativity and quantum theories  because I don’t understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle,  refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.

There is an incredible law and order within all things, which is beautiful to behold and can only be explained as being part of the will of God.  While both science and art attempt to sum up this profound mystery, science differs from art in that its ultimate purpose is practical functionality.  Technology developed for medicine or war has a minimum ethical requirement, otherwise it would harm life and tend towards “evil.”  To those who explore the fundamental principles of nature, the unavoidable impulse of mankind is similar to the artist’s actualization of bypassing the concept “why do you do this?” Likewise, when Salvador Dalí discovered the so-called “morphology of the ear-shaped vortex” in the structure of everything from a head of cabbage, a snail, to the atomic nucleus and the universe, he was subsequently delighted to find this ear-shaped spiral in all things.

Gaston Bachelard said, “the so-called universe is my resting place, my idleness, but it is definitely not my way of thinking;” only a child can think like this.  Chang uses physical models to create his own playground, which does not preclude his own curiosity or his appreciation of one’s private secrets. When these images of physical models manifest themselves on the page one by one, the external, public world fades away and leaves behind one person’s happiness and sorrows. The more skillfully he shrinks the world, the more accurately he is able to contain the world.  Although physicality cannot be restored, Chang creates a mysterious crystalline place filled with an innocent poetic.

Poetry is the metaphysics of transience. The prospects of the universe, the secrets of the soul, the joy of existence—all of this is contained within poetry.  If poetry only obeyed life’s logic, then it would be less than life; that it is superior to life is only because it can simultaneously enjoy varied experiences that come in myriad forms.  In this respect, Chang has created his own metaphor; his imagination hovers between material and form as he tenaciously grafts together unusual objects.  Chang has furthermore tirelessly maintained an intense intellectual space between peaceful unity and hostile heterogeneity wherein he launches into a length of his imaginary journey like Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Little Prince, who sees that things are actually smaller than the universe and closer to clarity, lightness and insightfulness.