Toast Series by Su Xinping from Red Gate Gallery at The Opposite House
TOAST SERIES
Red Gate is pleased to announce the Toast Series sculptures by Su Xinping at The Opposite House, Beijing. Renowned as a printmaker, painter and educator (Su Xinping is deputy head of the printmaking department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), this new installation reincarnates the personages from his prints and paintings of the same title. The life-sized figures of pot-bellied men raising their glasses are a social commentary on the culture of communal drinking in China. Historically, drinking has been a collective activity embedded with male social codes initiated by the host. Su’s bare-chested men of strikingly frank physiques are visually disconcerting as they represent almost caricature portraitures of stark humanity. Made of fibreglass, the figure’s skin in matt tones give them a hyper-real surface while the blank and melancholic gaze seems to suggest an existential isolation. The mood is one of pessimism, in search of escapism as the artist attempts to unfold the complexities of the human condition in today’s New China.
The exhibition is on view now till end of April 2010 at the lobby of The Opposite House, Beijing
Liyu Yeo
2010.04.09