Jin Jiangbo : Dialogue with Nature

Starkwhite is pleased to present Jin Jiangbo: Dialogue with Naturefrom 20 June to 17 September 2011.

Previous to the new body of work featured in Dialogue with Nature, Jin Jiangbo became known to international contemporary art audiences through a practice that sought to not only chart China's growing global influence but also explore the impact of change upon both the urban landscape and its people.

At a time of immense economic, social and cultural shift, Jin Jiangbo's photography, installation and multimedia works capture this momentous transition while also highlighting the incongruities hidden behind the rise of a burgeoning superpower. Panoramic photos of abandoned factories, unfinished residences or the debris left by rapid and often overnight factory closures bear witness to China's economic miracle, but also the withdrawal and decay that too-hasty development can inflict. In his photographs the urban landscape becomes a social imprint of the powerful and spectacular transformation wrought by and upon contemporary China. It is not just scenery but social landscape the artist is delivering - vivid, telling and richly symbolic.

New Zealand audiences were introduced to Jin Jiangbo's work at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2009 in China in Four Seasons,a year-long suite of exhibitions and residencies by Chinese artists curated by Rhana Devenport.His exhibition featured large-scale photographic panoramas from series titled Prospects of theChinese Market, The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene, and Shanghai, Shanghai Engine Plan, all setting China's socialist economic landscape against a backdrop of economic, social and cultural upheaval.

In 2010 Jin Jiangbo returned New Zealand as a visiting scholar at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. During his three-month stay he journeyed to the deep south and the far north capturing images along the way for a new project, which he describes as "a form of dialogue with nature". In his new series of photographs Jin Jiangbo looks again to landscape but of a very different kind. Again we see an allegorical approach to image making in this new series and also the artist's astute temporality, but the location has shifted from urban China to the seemingly untouched and remote landscapes of New Zealand. Offering a series of views of mountains, lakes, ominous skies and windswept beaches, sometimes accompanied by panels naming the places and executed in the artist's hand in the manner of traditional calligraphy, the artist draws upon iconic New Zealand scenery and offers it back to the viewer with a plot twist, that of shanshui, an ancient style of Chinese painting that first rose to prominence in the Liu Song Dynasty.

Frequently we see an artist take something unfamiliar and make it recognisable, acting as a broker into the mainstream of unfamiliar ideas, concepts and approaches. Yet what we see in this new series of images is the inverse - the artist taking something well known and making it unfamiliar, even slightly alien.

In these images our well known places look strange, unlike what we know. Jin Jiangbo offers us a reworking of our own landscape through his own heritage and China's shanshui tradition, giving it a cultural inflection that allows New Zealanders to look through new cultural eyes - to look afresh at what we thought we knew. Presenting the work in the style of a one and a half millennia old tradition, Jin Jiangbo has made the familiar unfamiliar.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo exhibitions, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.  Starkwhite represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Rim.

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