A
precocious youth forced to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution,
the painter Zhu Jinshi afterwards joined the seminal new art group the Stars (星星), producing works that dabbled in the imported medium of abstraction.
Eager to explore Western-style modernism, he moved to Berlin in 1985, only to
discover that his work was actually decades behind the times.
However,
after spending 20 years in Berlin, he returned to Beijing and continued his practice
without becoming an international sensation or a symbol of “Chinese-ness.”
The works
in the artist’s current solo exhibition at Blum & Poe on the Upper East
Side can be compared to the abstractions of Robert Motherwell or Richard
Diebenkorn, though they sometimes play with semi-abstraction, as in the face
appearing out of a swirl of blue and red paint in “Elder Feng” (2015). There
are also two sculptural pieces, “Bank” (2013), a landscape-like mound of golden
yellow oil paint, and the Donald Judd-indebted “Nine Levels” (2015), a modular
work consisting of nine boxy floor pieces.
In many of
these works, references are made to historical and political experience, but if
they appear to go for a too-easy symbolism (the golden “Bank” sculpture, for
example), the artist seems less concerned with expressing concepts than with
manipulating difficult forms, pushing content to a secondary position
(including, again, any political or so-called “Chinese” qualities that might
inhabit the works).
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