Zhou Yilun: Pay Back the Money that You Owe

Fabien Fryns Fine Art is pleased to announce Zhou Yilun's debut solo exhibition in the US.

During his residency in Los Angeles over the past summer, Zhou spent everyday investigating different neighborhoods and treasure-hunting at vintage stores. Working mainly at night, he would then recollect his diurnal impressions and translate them to his paintings and collages incorporating imagery culled from pornographic magazines, lifestyle publications, discarded photographs by strangers and gossip columns on the Internet. His new body of work manifests his penchant to intervene in media constructions of pop culture and challenge the viewer’s aesthetic comfort with his barbarous, whimsical and desultory style, both in the choice of materials and his pictorial manner.

A set of eight collages, paintings and painted photographs is mostly recycled with discarded or used materials collected by Zhou in Los Angeles. Each piece, be it a paper collage of Hollywood celebrities in Bikinis or a sketch of a naked woman riding on an alligator or a painted portrait of a young Chinese communist couple holding hands, seems to tell an ambiguous tale. Jointly however they ostensibly coalesce a ridiculed sociological landscape of our society. The largest canvas painting in the exhibition is titled “I Wish You Were Naked Too. ” The painting in charcoal, contrasting to his usual simplified composition, depicts a seized moment at a boisterous banquet. The glasses are empty. The plates are pushed aside. Hundreds of satiated, naked, big-bellied and middle-finger-flipping banquet goers are sitting back in their chairs cheerfully staring at the viewer. The surface of the painting is then slashed and vandalized. The original photograph that this painting is derived from is juxtaposed on the wall. A viscous layer of white acrylic paint is plagued on top of the photograph, which conceals a large portion of the image. In the white paint, an ice cream cone is concaved. On the intentionally exposed fringes of the photo, the viewer can easily make out the formally dressed and happily fed men and women at the banquet tables. It was the photo of the employee Christmas banquet of 7up Corporation in 1960. On the associated painting, Zhou cleverly adulterates the picture with vulgarity and levity to switch the time and the space to an anachronistic state of mind. With precipitate and frenzy charcoal strokes and the graffiti action of tagging, Zhou seems to enjoy making a “bad” painting to subject the established aesthetic tastes and social values to vicious intervention and sarcasm. His provocative attitude does not emerge as a surprise. An iconoclast, Zhou lives outside the art communities in a remote neighborhood of Hangzhou, China. He surrounds himself with people whom are often misunderstood as outcasts. He finds their eccentric characters and non-conformist visions more agreeable with his own recalcitrant and humorous nature.

Not all of his works measure up equally in terms of their execution. His meticulous drawing on a piece of 4-by-3-inch oval tracing paper, titled “A Portrait with the Crashed UFOs,” depicts three soldiers, judging by their uniforms, from the World War II era proudly posing with two unknown opaque objects: one besides them and the other behind them. With all the convoluted details, it is easily mistaken for a black-and-white photograph. The drawing is then framed in a weathered brass pendant to further give a mocked banal appearance. The message underlined is not immediately clear. What clear is that Zhou intends to tease the viewer with ambiguity to arouse the senses of anachronism, happenstance and fantasy. In his own words, Zhou articulates that “painting is about representing simultaneous visual events in different spaces in intended coincidences. It also has a slight sense of retaliating against the present space and time. The vengeance occurs unintentionally, but the unintentional is intended. ”

Zhou Yilun was born in 1983 in Hangzhou, China. He graduated from the Art Academy of China in 2006.

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday through Saturday 12 pm to 6 pm and by appointment.