ENLI ZHANG
The rest of the paint 1
2011
Oil on canvas
180 x 200 x 4 cm

Chinese contemporary painter Zhang Enli (born in1965) is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists to emerge from China since the 1990s. Born in Jilin Province, he studied at the Arts and Crafts Institute of Shanghai (now Shanghai University), where he later taught. Zhang’s work is heavily marked by his personal transition and move from a rural setting to a major city, and over the course of its evolution his painting has explored the contrast between country and city as environmental and psychological polarities.

For Zhang, the meeting point of two contrasting worlds – the rural paradigm and big city life, the reliably constant and the forever mutable, the certain past and unfathomable future – resides in the ordinary objects and anonymous interstitial spaces he encounters each day. His paintings of things that lie close at hand mark a strong departure from the frenzied and more fashionable work of his peers; in bearing no relation to the Political Pop, Kitsch Art, and Cynical Realism that have emerged from China’s post-socialist society, Zhang’s art captures a shared realm of universality and suspension that is increasingly palpable to citizens of our present world.

Zhang often shows the emptiness of his depicted objects – cardboard boxes, ashtrays, tin chests, cans, etc. – so that they can be filled with new sensations and feelings by viewers. Freed from all prescriptive narrative, these glimpses of ordinariness – most of which were found in and around Zhang’s own studio and are captured in florescent-lit colors and textures achieved via thin applications of pigment – at first seem objective. They entice the viewer with an accessible first-person perspective and universally recognizable subject matter that could be found in any city, in any country.

But Zhang disrupts our gaze by leaving visible the orthogonal grids he uses as a painting aid, suggesting a conspicuous intervention that renders the banal suddenly uncanny. Here, he departs from the long tradition of still life painting as mimesis and celebration of the special, and becomes part of a different tradition in which the artist purposefully transfigures our attention. We meet and share his view for a moment, and in doing so perceive a tactile, tangible, and palpable realm where homely everyday things may be the most powerful and reliable markers of history and time. By honoring the unexceptional physical tools and corners of everyday life, Zhang Enli unsentimentally but poignantly indicates that we are universally bound by our intimate acquaintance with such things and by an almost involuntary nostalgia for a shared past. And his canvases remind us that these otherwise unremarkable objects may yet exist when we are long gone. In a world characterized by perpetual flux, Zhang’s paintings hint that objects are metaphors and experience may be defined not by change and difference, but constancy and commonality.