Opening：November 8, 2019 (Friday) 10:30-12:00
Venue：UOB Art Gallery, Shanghai, China
Organizer：United Overseas Bank
Co-organizer：West Bund Art & Design

Zheng Chongbin's solo exhibition What the Space Wants to Be is opening on November 8th at the United Overseas Bank Art Gallery in Shanghai. Organized by UOB and co-organized by West Bund Art & Design, the exhibition presents the artist's recent works from 2016 to 2019, which have never been shown together before.
This exhibition is not a mere experimentation of the possibility of ink as a medium or way of expression. But rather anexploration using the dynamic geometric forms as a visual language - especially the irregular geometric fragments, the Euclid geometry in the human body, the relationship of different locations of objects, and the abstract and mathematical topology in continuous space - to illustrate the dynamic interaction of the physical world and human experience.

About the Artist
Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961) has held the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. Systematically exploring and deconstructing their conventions and constituents—figure, texture, space, geometry, gesture, materiality—he has developed a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. Central to Zheng’s art is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohered and dissipated. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought, this worldview enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng’s paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order (including organic life and human consciousness) and its inevitable dissipation. His paintings thus resemble natural structures ranging from neurons, blood vessels, and tree branches to mountains, rivers, and coastlines, but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.

About INK studio
INK studio is an art gallery based in Beijing. Its mission is to present Chinese experimental ink as a distinctive contribution to contemporary transnational art-making in a closely-curated exhibition program supported by in-depth critical analysis, scholarly exchange, bilingual publishing, and multimedia production. INK studio curates three to four major solo projects per year with artists such as Bingyi, Dai Guangyu, He Yunchang, Li Jin, Li Huasheng, Wang Dongling, Yang Jiechang, and Zheng Chongbin and exhibits works of diverse media, including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and video. Since its inception in 2012, INK Studio has regularly appeared at art fairs such as the Armory Show (New York), Art Basel Hong Kong, and West Bund Art & Design (Shanghai) and placed works into major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.