厄尔塔

SPURS Gallery is pleased to present Hou Zichao’s solo exhibition “Child in the Woods” featuring 14 new paintings in both gallery I and II. The exhibition extends theme of the depictions of landscape in Hou's previous 2019 solo exhibition “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines”, and continues to explore how painting intervenes in the context of the human-nature relation. The exhibition will open on April 30, 2022.

Towards the end of 2021, Hou was stranded in the Greater Khingan, a mountain range in the Inner Mongolia region, which is actually situated in Northeast China and it also stretches over the eastern part of Mongolia. Deep inside the Greater Khingan Mountains, the Ewenki people live deep in the dense forests. One of the Ewenki Hou met during this trip has a son, whose name goes by “Er-Ta”, meaning “Child in the Woods”. This short encounter with the Ewenkis dropped an anchor in Hou’s recent works surrounding human-nature relations; The Ewenki culture retains a philosophy of co-existence of human intelligence and nature.

Hou Zichao investigates the matter of trees. Totemic symbolism captures the human desire for revelation bequeathed by nature and the quest for understanding power. It hints at the human-nature interactions while depicting the will of the ideal, thoughts flashing by. In the end, objects like trees, snowballs and shadow cast by roofs appear in his paintings without ambiguity. A tree-like sculptural column in Gallery I mirrors the subject of tree on the painterly plane. The tree discretely supports the pictorial world where artificial and natural landscapes overlap. With hard edges clashing dense textures, vectorized graphics, and increasingly rich colors, the image arrives at a suspension among natural landscapes, its digital emulation, and its visual representation in painting.

Hou Zichao begins an image in a chaotic state. States of mind and emotional turbulence traverse unrest, weaving together information through stacking, deduction, and extraction to arrive at a subtle balance between humans and nature. Painting, then, becomes “the medium connecting nature and society”, an amalgamation of information fragments produced by a world of perpetual motion and perpetual change. The picture becomes a source of power for viewers to inspect and introspect.

The exhibition is on view until June 5, 2022.