MANGROVEGALLERY 红树林画廊

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Liang QuanNew Spring
2024.5.18-7.13
MANGROVEGALLERY

MANGROVEGALLERY is honored to announce a solo exhibition of Liang Quan, New Spring. This is Liang’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. It will exhibit a selection of works by Liang, most of which are part of his Green Series, as well as the experimental works of paper collage from his early years, the works from Fountain Series newly completed between 2023 and 2024 using water-based pigment mixed with tea, and a mixed media window installation work Fountain in collaboration with the architect Liu Xiaodu.

In Liang as well as the tradition he has espoused, abstract art always has its concrete, personal side. The nuanced details in one’s daily life are in every way integrated into the world on the canvas, indispensable for the cultivation of the mind and the comprehension of the reality. The meaning behind New Spring, accordingly, is two-fold. One is about Liang Quan’s lifelong passion for tea. Two is about a mind that needs to be cleansed of impurities and returned to purity, at all times. New Spring is homophonous with “spring of the heart” in Chinese. To illustrate how Liang’s paintings acquire the clarity, luminosity, and some Zen serenity that they have, we work with the architect Liu Xiaodu to reconstruct the everyday living space of the artist on the second floor of the gallery— the three bedrooms apartment that the institute he worked for allotted him in the early 1990s, which doubles as his studio throughout the years. The room is simple, as if time has stopped in a bygone era. At a wooden table in the hallway, Liang works, reads, spreads out the drawing paper, and mixes the paint. At the same table, he eats, drinks tea, and receives guests. This slightest cramped corner seems to have contained all the secrets about Liang’s art: not somewhere else, but here, now, in this heart.