“If you are curious, you’ll find the puzzles around you.
If you are determined, you will solve them.”
Erno Rubik
In the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness
Will Smith’s character Chris Gardner secures an interview for the job that will
change his life by solving a Rubik’s Cube for the potential employer’s recruiter
during a shared taxi ride. In 1974 the “cube”, the solving of which is often
equated with intelligence, was invented by a Hungarian Professor of
architecture, Erno Rubik,
primarily to explain to his students spatial relationships. Six years later it
was on its way to becoming the most popular toy in history.
About his cube, Rubik told CNN “probably
the most characteristic part of the cube is the contradiction between
simplicity and complexity. I think probably that's part of the key to the
success of the cube -- you are able to have a connection with this order and
chaos.”
It is a situation that is not dissimilar
to what is happening in Chinese art according to Arne Glimcher, the number
three art dealer in Forbes Magazine’s top ten. As he told the Phaidon
Press website in 2012 “The Cultural Revolution destroyed the entire
history of China for a generation. So you’re dealing with the oldest country in
the world and the newest country in the world and that schism between who they
were and who they are and that is happening in China.”
Enter to this milieu Chinese
conceptional artist Zhao Yao. Using painting
rather than installation to express his ideas, Zhao is “no longer concerned with making something
that is simply interesting in itself.” As he says about his paintings “They are informed by observations of
what others are looking at, and how they are looking.”
As Zhao
explained to Time Out,
Beijing “These pictures are imaginative. At the same time they are ready-made,
taken from a series used to train kids to think logically; things like color
patterns and exercises to teach them to move shapes around and form a new
design. By integrating these lessons with the mass-produced cloth, these appear
as abstract works of art.”
To which he
added “‘I like it more when the audience doesn’t trust the artist’s
perspective, when the artist doesn’t trust himself and when the audience
doesn’t even trust itself.” With a final proviso “Don’t trust me; don’t trust
anything.”
His current
exhibition Zhao Yao: Painting of Thought
is on show at Hong Kong’s Pace
Gallery from the 15 of January to the 26th of February.
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