noir or noir

We call relatives which means temporary and conditional. Most of the concepts we face in everyday life are relative, such as “black and white” in texts, or “sequencing”. In the title of the exhibition “Noir or Noir”, “Noir” means “black” both visually and connotationally. In the context of “relativity”, their “blackness”has its own meaning. Of course, in a finite human life, “time” and “space” are also relative, we exist relative to each other, but at the moment we are parallel to each other in a certain order. Time and space represent the order of evolution in two dimensions, like the two parallel “Noirs” in the title, just like the two artists in the exhibition: Wu Zhuozhao is an artist who works with “time” as his theme, and Huang Yizhe is an artist who works in a different “space”. "The two artists we are travelling with are Wu Zhuozhao, an artist who works in “time”, and Huang Yizhe, who condenses her perceptions in a different “space”, where they are parallel and opposite to each other, forming a common sequence.

Wu Zhuozhao defines each unit in his works through the unit time. The “unit time” that has been separated is locked in the many similar units in the work, so that the patterns produced by the images are the surface readable symbols of “time”.In this case, the artist presents the illusion of the passage of time and its absorption by recreating the very common cross pattern of life and eliminating other color distractions in an orderly rotation around a central, unrotated 0° cross origin. It is not limited to this, but can be both a temporally dislocated existence under the same space-time and a multi-temporal, temporally homogeneous existence. In other words, “0”, “20” and “40”...... each time with  20°rotation produce works that may even be parallel spaces under the same temporal plane, each with a different degree of intensity of activity, yet operating simultaneously in a unit of time. Most interestingly, the two works, “0”and“180”, which all eventually return to the origin of 0°, are consistent results, but very different in process and meaning from each other, so that for rational nature the results do not exist.

Having lived in different countries and cities in the past, Huang Yizhe has a rich visual experience of the diverse world that makes up her own “space”.“Living in different places”seems to lead her to both abstraction and concreteness in her art, as she says, "many street scenes repeat themselves", perhaps in her subconscious, she has summarized the familiar schema again and again, and then constructed a temporary seemingly stable and geometric plane space. At the same time, she cannot forget the vast amount of information that she has experienced along the way, and these variables move through the images to create the instability between the works, as well as the specificity of the differences underneath the whole. Therefore, under the seemingly static and absolute “metaphysics”, she instead settles on embodying the “movement” in the stillness, leaving the colorfullness, clarity and simplicity that are like a vow of life activity in her creations. However, the geographical changes have broken this down again, and what was once simple and spontaneous has become flexible and complex, so that the picture is encrypted by a layer of white, the question being: is the white paint covering black, grey or color?

Wang Yiyi

2022.1.15