One of the renowned group of artists who left China in the 1980s, Zhu was marked by his move to Germany and his encounters with the work of artists including Beuys, and the Arte Povera and Fluxus movements, among others. Abandoning painting for a short time, he began to engage in more radical forms of expression, producing conceptual, installation and performance work and exploring possibilities for extending art into physical space. Zhu’s practice was characterised by its use of contemporary Western art theory to uncover new possibilities in the cultural resources and materials of China. It is a mark of his quality as an artist that he continues to forge a fresh and profoundly distinctive idiom out of his two ‘homes’. 

The framework of the exhibition provides the opportunity to see works from two of the most iconic categories of Zhu Jinshi’s oeuvre, installation and painting, in conversation. Work, an arresting site-specific Xuan paper installation conceived by the artist for the gallery space, stretches over 30 metres and is created from 8,000 sheets of rice paper, a medium which Zhu has returned to throughout his career and which he reinvents through monumental installations, individually crumpled and rolled by hand and partially dipped in black ink. Xuan paper has been used in China for millennia. It is the first paper ever invented for writing and has been traditionally used as a surface for calligraphy and scholarly ink and brush painting. It is steeped in inherited social and cultural associations. Work demonstrates Zhu’s engagement with the installation work that he encountered in Germany in the 80s, yet contrasts the cool, intellectual, industrial nature of Minimalist sculpture with the delicacy of paper that bears traces of the hand, engaging emotion before intellect. This will be placed in dialogue with the sensuous, impassioned surfaces of Zhu’s current repertoire of near-sculptural abstract oil paintings—a medium that Zhu has for over a decade renewed with his attempt to capture the encounter between his own subjectivity and his experience of the world in the form of paint. 

In this exhibition, Zhu ruminates on how his engagements with both painting and installation can come together in a manner that conjures up possibilities for understanding the term “simplicity” in relation to the artistic philosophies of Minimalism, Arte Povera and Mono-ha. Zhu views the terms “simplicity” and “Minimalism” as interlinked; both emphasise an extreme idea of subtraction and the use of an utmost economy of expression. The distinction here is that for Zhu, “simplicity” does not focus on the act of singularising, but rather on bringing simple, uncomplicated objects into the scope of art, and allowing them to generate creativity. 

Zhu states that, “In today’s world, we are not lacking in concepts, but instead lack firsthand experience, sensory perception and emotional contact. In this exhibition, ‘simplicity’ is not conceived as a theoretical rationale, but rather a term that characterises an approach to art that is re-grounded in encountering, experiencing and perceiving firsthand and on-site.”