Hanart TZ Gallery to Present New Works by Yi Zhou

Written by Gareth Cheeseman Saturday, 24 December 2011 22:57

Hong Kong.- Hanart TZ Gallery is pleased to present "Sculpture Labyrinth: A Journey of My Mind - New Works by Yi Zhou" on view at the gallery from January 6th through January 30th 2012. This solo exhibition represents the first attempt of the artist to re-interpret her body of work from the past decade. The artist has revisited some of her most significant sculptural pieces for these new animations, abstracting and animating them with 3D modeling.  For her debut at Hanart TZ Gallery, Yi Zhou will also present three new sculptures. This will be the first time since her 2011 Venice Biennale Collateral Exhibition “Days of Yi” that the artist shows her video “Labyrinth”.

“Labyrinth” was created during a time when the artist was making a transition back to Shanghai from Paris. Signs and symbols from China and Europe merge as though flowing through the stream of the unconscious. The camera eye revolves and rotates in crescendo starting from a common standpoint. Increasingly the viewer seems to lose control of her or his senses with each new spin. Elements of fire, water, sea creatures, human bodies converge to connote hope, yet they equally seem to cast doubts about faith in humanity. Every character, landscape and building in Yi Zhou's animations is a result of intense research with her team. They reflect the daily visual research through archives, books, travel notes, as well as the constantly changing emotional hues of the artist. If Yi Zhou's body of work created in the decade between 2001 and 2011 are represented mainly by animation and digital film, the upcoming decade will probably show a fast-forward plunge into a future marked by a critical, and yet somehow nostalgic approach, and it will involve constant revisits of the artist's previous virtual works.


Yi Zhou is a young Chinese artist, who has lived in Rome from the age of ten and studied between London and Paris with a degree in Political Science and Economics. Living between Paris and Shanghai, she creates large multimedia installation artworks that blend film, digital animation, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and contemporary music composition. Her works explore the realm of hyper-realism and neo-realism: on one hand, she derives visual and tangible forms from the imagination and dreams, while on the other hand, she gives a surreal aspect to nature itself. Her work is a complex synthesis of imagination, literature, mythology, philosophy and new technology and is impregnated with Chinese and Mediterranean culture. Her works introduce the disturbing magic of both virtual and supernatural characters and landscapes as well as the ephemeral reality of life, love, and death while using the symbolic language of the unconscious.Blending ancient expressive methods, such as sculpture in marble and 35mm film, with extremely technologically advanced ones, such as 3D animation, Yi Zhou presents a vision of life, transcending both time and space, inflected with irony and wit. In 2011, Yi Zhou held a solo Collatoral Exhibition “Days of Yi” at Venice Biennale, and was selected by Sundance Film Festival for the 4th consecutive time. She lives between Shanghai and Paris.

Hanart TZ Gallery was founded in 1983 and specializes in promoting and exhibiting contemporary Chinese art and is a leader in its field. Hanart TZ Gallery has exhibited many internationally recognised Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong artists and has organised significant exhibitions of the Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming, at the Singapore Art Museum in 1986 and Place Vendome in Paris in 1997; China’s New Art Post-1989, a major retrospective of the Mainland Chinese avant-garde artists was shown during the 1993 Hong Kong Arts Festival and then toured the USA between 1995 to 1997; and A Strange Heaven, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese photographic art from Mainland China, Taiwan and Kong Kong in Prague in 2003. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.hanart.com/

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