Mai 36 Galerie is pleased to host the second solo exhibition of artist Zang Kunkun at the ground floor of the gallery.
Zang Kunkun uses various materials and objects, which are often ignored in everyday life, with the aim of transforming everyday perception and placing it in new, also political contexts. Inexpensive and everyday things like advertising posters for cell phones, opening posters of a shopping mall, US coins, plastic foam, packaging waste are combined with an artistic elegance and complex mental ideas to reflect the reality in which we currently find ourselves.
The new series "Barnett Newman in Socialism" and "Mark Rothko in Socialism" deal with the idea of modern minimalist abstraction in Western art history and refer to the "sublimity" that, for example, the important representatives of American Abstract Expressionism, Newman and Rothko, pursued in their art. In his new works, Zang Kunkun deals with the motif of minimalization and simplification and integrates it into the context of the rapid and expansive urbanization in China.
