Yuzheng Cheng

Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of the Chinese artist Yuzheng Cheng. Yuzheng Cheng was born in Shuzou in 1977 and studied painting in the school of fine arts in Berlin (UDK) with professor K.H. Hoedicke.

Yuzheng Cheng calls a series of paintings “Landscapes” in which he has a critical look at mass media’s images of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq. Without giving a definite judgment his works are about the understanding of these images from a painter’s point of view. He assembles and spreads wide panoramas or tightens the composition in a single motif. Against the common pictures of war Cheng sets up the irritating frightlessness of calm and fair painting. Mostly his landscapes are painted with a top view. In Chinese painting this peculiar viewing from a higher point is called “ flat distance” that puts the beholder in a elementary way in front of the painting. For the smaller works frontality and exemptness of the motifs take over this function. The pictures are painted harshly and combine Asian set-up with European gesture. The figures are painted without face that might be reminiscent of a sentence by the artist Kuo Hsi (1020-1090): “Far away people have no eyes”.

In the current exhibition with the title “Liebe Gruesse” Yuzheng will present paintings in big and smaller size. He collects images from the flee- market, like old postcards from the 60s and 70s with images from mountain landscapes in Germany (black forest), etiquettes from consuming products etc., and transforms them into painting, trying always to bring the gleams of time into his pictures.

Therefore recedence, dissimilarity and uncertainty characterize Chengs’s works; thus every painting depicts a deformational necessity through its entry into the specific dimensions of the pictorial. Whilst Cheng breaks down the visual and brings it back into place in a transformed way he shatters all those things without saying by the emptiness of their representation. He questions the elementary means of painting and in accordance with the pictorial his paintings enable a clearer view of the real world by turning it into a painterly reality.