Untitled 01
Jiang Zhi
蒋志
Production date
2010
Object Detail
Media
acrylic and oil on canvas
Measurements
160 x 280 cm
Notes
Jiang Zhi’s paintings Untitled 01 (2010), deny simple binaries of abstraction versus realism. They replicate corrupted, fragmented images from computer screens that have experienced a ‘system error’, translated freehand from screen to canvas, their geometric forms and repeated vertical and horizontal stripes rendered with great precision. Between 2001 and 2009 Jiang collected images formed by dragging the computer mouse whenever the computer suffered a ‘glitch’. Is this a parody of the post-painterly ‘hard-edge’ abstract painting of the late 1960s? Or is it, rather, merely a dead-pan depiction of life in the digital world of the twenty-first century, the same frustrations computer users experience every day on a global scale? Jiang Zhi says that he is reflecting on time. These images, transferred from their temporary state on a flickering computer monitor, then projected onto canvas and painted with oils, are an acknowledgement that the external world is just a product of our sensory perception. In the end, he says, the world has no objective existence.
Accession number
2011.036