Zhang Ding

Venus 5/5, 2014

The Chinese Artist Zhang Ding emerged to an international audience through his multimedia, performative spatial configura-tions with religious motifs and spiritual themes. The canvases entitled Venus were originally part of a space installation consisting of five paintings, and two black steel sculptures (Black Guardians / Black Orbit), which were positioned at the entrance of the installation like ancient sentinel figures. For the acrylic pictures the artist chose in the first version of the installation, that was exhibited at the New York Armory Show in early 2014, a dark-red background for the, which binds with the emblematic presence of the reddish-yellow arrow‑like forms to create a spatial movement. He restricts the colors to black, gray, red and yellow, and uses minimal graphic language: in this respect, the picture conforms to conventional astronomical visualizations of the phases of Venus. However, Zhang Ding also takes the scientific models a stage further, extending them to those aesthetic, symbolic and spiritual dimensions that are fundamentally true for all human beings.