February 4, 2012 |
Unlike many of his peers, though, his work doesn’t tackle his country’s consumer-culture rebirth, glittering with pop icons, ads and sci-fi urban development. At least not in an obvious way. His paintings have a quiet gravitas, depicting things as ordinary and universal as an overturned bucket or wintry tree branches, mixing pallid and funereal hues.
In fact Zhang Enli is no stranger to the metropolis. He has lived in Shanghai for more than 20 years. Yet, as his work suggests, the changing pace of life on its streets is not his natural habitat. Enli was born and raised in Jilin, a little town in China’s northeast, and his work taps into the sense of displacement and alienation that comes with the new, inhospitable world of the big city, and the country’s evolution from communism to a fresh brand of capitalism.
In recent years people have disappeared from his paintings but the canvases are haunted nonetheless by souls moving on. This is perhaps strongest in his paintings of empty rooms. For example, in A Corner of Studio, shown at his recent New York exhibition at mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, a bare, windowless space, with stained white walls, a lone plug socket and snaking exposed wires shrieks abandonment. Empty Paint Cans, a musical arrangement of circles and half-moons on the other hand, with touches of washed-out pinks and greens, has a hushed beauty. The white grille in Metal Net, with its diamond-shaped openings, allowing glimpses of shadowy forms beyond, clearly speaks of barriers and isolation. A number of his paintings show footballs or basketballs caught in nets. Are they waiting for the game to begin or have they been sitting there for ages, the players having long moved on?
All the emphasis on what’s lost and what remains certainly seems pertinent for present-day China. What’s perhaps most impressive about Enli, though, is the timeless relevance and global reach of his images, reminding us that the only certainty in life is the everyday things around us.
by Skye Sherwin
