WANG Ningde: The Deluge: Solo Exhibition

WANG Ningde: The Deluge

Curated by ZHANG Li

18 May – 28 June, 2024

Don Gallery, 2555-9 Longteng Aveune, Xuhui District, Shanghai

Don Gallery is very pleased to announce the opening of WANG Ningde's solo exhibition, The Delgue, at the gallery from 18 May to 28 June 2024, which aims to focus on the artist's ongoing series of "Photogram" since the end of 2021. The exhibition's title graphically depicts a novel approach to picture creation that the artist has taken. The series includes static images of plants within a compressed space, against colorful backgrounds, their embedded forms inhabit a space between randomness and intentionality, and the dried ink creates rich layers of expected and unexpected colors, as if a flood had left its mark on the earth. Although these images conform to the conventional notions of shape and colour, their formation is not through a brush or a camera, but rather stems from the direct imprints produced by the interaction of plants, seeds and other living organisms with water, further prompting us to re-examine the photographic tradition and the generative mechanism of aesthetic experience. In addition, the artist's focus on plants is not only a retrospective of his hometown, but also a keen reflection on the broader issues of people and environment, land, history, ecology and humanity. The exhibition, curated by ZHANG Li, also marks the artist's first solo exhibition at Don Gallery.

In “The Deluge” and its preceding works, WANG questions and expands on the mechanisms of producing and viewing photography, reflecting on multiple dimensions of photography’s compositional mechanisms, including the language of expression and material technology, and at the centre of this mechanism is the single-point perspective image, which is to say, the "reproduction" of a set scene and object in an "objective" way. In his works spanning “In the Years of Ningde” and “Let There Be Light,” the artist critiques the rigidity of photographic concepts. In “Form of Light” and “No Name,” WANG deconstructs and recombines how images are presented and the significance of objects. And, as he moves from “Negative Light” to “The Deluge”, the artist offers a unique approach to image “reproduction,” and explicitly constructs a visual communication system that departs from the single-point perspective scene.

In the way objects are directly imprinted on paper in “The Deluge” series, WANG’s work only exists in the “first distance,” which is formed when the viewer sees the artwork. The composition, depth, color tones, and background do “suggest” the sky or land, and this may encourage the viewer to place the plants in “The Deluge” within a constructed place. However, this still does not constitute a virtual space because the plants are manifested in their original forms. Therefore, the viewers are not looking at simulated objects, instead, they see traces left behind by the object. In this relationship, the image is no longer a reference to the object, but the object itself.

While he was working on “The Deluge,” WANG also created a collection of titanium plate transfers of images of trees, forests, and vegetation he photographed over the years. Though WANG may not have had a clear understanding of his intentions when taking these photos, these images of plants have become more significant than nostalgic memories of home—they have sunk into the artist’s subconscious awareness, and he continues to seek out and pore over their traces in his memory.