Zhang Yunyao at Watou Arts Festival: 3 JULY – 5 SEPTEMBER 2021

ZHANG Yunyao presents new series Spirit, water drop and the light at Watou Arts Festival, Belgium

From 3 July to 5 September 2021, the city of Poperinge in Belguim hosts the 40th edition of Watou Arts Festival. The curators Benedicte Goesaert, Chantal Pattyn and Peter Verhelst have realized ‘Watou 2021’ as an outstretched hand to experience poetry and visual art with brains, senses and feelings, thus being filled with the multi-layered nature of art.

For this special occasion, ZHANG Yunyao created Spirit, water drop and the light (2021), a series of graphite works on paper comprising one large scale triptych and five small drawings, executed during a visit to Paris that was indefinitely extended due to Covid-19. The moments depicted in these monochromatic drawings – the gushing fountain of the Place Saint-Sulpice, the dancing reflection of light on the glass frame of a Twombly drawing – are imbued with a sense of wistfulness and longing. They capture the evanescent vitality of everyday instances encountered by the artist while processing the loss of a loved one in a strange city. Other meditations, such as the tenuous knot of an inflated balloon or the flimsy heads of dandelion blooms, evoke the at once steadfast and precarious thresholds of our own existence.

This series is a departure from Zhang’s bold, highly contrasted paintings on felt, a material he began exploring in 2011 that has figured prominently in his practice ever since. Where the felt works formally trouble and render unstable the fixity of his subjects – classical bronze and marble sculptures from antiquity – Spirit, water drop and the light reads as a poetic yet painstaking attempt to grasp the fleeting notes of which life is composed for just a moment longer by bestowing attention on the beautiful, yet ultimately transient, present. 

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